One Less Diaper at a Time = EC!

I joined Greenwala a while back – they often have great contest ideas like the “Tree Hugging” Photo contest – cute!

The latest I learnt this morning in the newsletter is:

What’s Your Story?Greenwala and helpareporterout.com want your help identifying stories about the most amazing eco-friendly, environmentally-conscious companies, products and services on the planet.

Submit a photo of the company (product, logo, or representative image) and a description – up to 500 words about how it is helping to reduce our impact on the planet and revolutionize the green economy. The story that gets the most votes will win a $500 Amex Gift card — and a featured article about the company, product or service on the Greenwala blog.

Greenwala is planting an additional tree for each entry with Trees For the Future.

I thought it was a great opportunity to spread the word about baby pottying as a way to be more eco-conscious about baby-waste!

Here is my entry:

Part Time Diaper Free! Can Just 1 Less Diaper Make a Difference?

Recycling is Great – Reducing is Better. With Baby Pottying You Will Reduce Your Babys Diaper Use!

Part Time Diaper Free is an initiative to support you as a parent of a baby in diapers to gradually REDUCE the environmental impact of your baby.

What if your baby wore just 1 less diaper a day?

Imagine the collective waste reduction of that simple idea, considering the millions of babies born each year and the billions of diapers trashed into landfill…

By discovering how to apply, to your usual day, several opportunities for your baby to ‘go’ in a baby potty, you can introduce them to the potty and participate in a natural process that has been a part of mothering for as long as women have been having babies!

Imagine this: Your baby needs a diaper change. You take them to the diaper change table, remove it, then pop them on a little potty and sing a potty song, and give a little sign or cue word – and they tinkle or more! Just like that, the next fresh diaper you put on will be drier for longer. In time, you will start communicating with your baby in a back and forth way, and less diapers will be the result.

Be reassured that with Baby Pottying, your baby wears a diaper between their potty visits, and you can offer just once a day and see how you go – easy! You might just see the end of many messy diaper changes before long, so be prepared for that…

My story is that I discovered how much FUN it was to ‘practice’ baby pottying, known by the cumbersome term ‘Elimination Communication’, and felt fabulous about how we used less and less diapers with our baby. So I wanted to share that joy with other parents, helping more babies to use fewer diapers overall, and helping our Earth in the process. I created part-time diaper free as a way to do that!

Created by Charndra Josling, Part Time Diaper Free! exists to help you to re-discover the way mothers before you reduced their use of diapers gently, gradually, resulting in fine eco-karma as your babys eco-footprint is smaller. With lots of resources to help out, including a free online guided tour (The 7 Secrets to Diaper Free Confidence) and a members only online course as well.

‘Diaper-Free’ is the destination, not the start, remember that!

Curious? Pop by…

Visit Part Time Diaper Free!

If you have a moment, please visit Greenwala to vote for my entry - and other great eco ideas from all over the place – one vote per entry is allowed per day.

This is an article on Ec by a ‘homesteading’ family living a green lifestyle eschewing many conveniences due to their location.

When preparing for the arrival of our son, Leo, our single greatest concern was the issue of diapers. It is estimated that a child will use an average of 2500 diapers in the first year alone, and some children stay in diapers for several of years. Considering that most people use non-biodegradable disposable diapers that end up in a landfill, this is a big problem, and we were not prepared to contribute to it. So what to do?

There are always the old fashioned cloth diapers. However, this counters our way of life on two levels. Firstly, we have only built one room of our house and our storage tanks are still fairly limited. This means that our water is precious to us and the extra laundry, which we do by hand, would use up a valuable resource. Secondly, we use our laundry water on the garden, making that resource go a little further. If we were to put human waste into the equation, we would have to put it all on our compost pile, a genuine loss for the food producing plants.

There are some biodegradable disposable options, which we would be able to compost ourselves. However, they are expensive and hard to come by where we live, making them a less than perfect solution. Besides, there is always the chance that a company might lie about their product, attaching the label biodegradable for added profit.

We started wondering what the rest of the world does. Not everyone has the money for or even access to diapers, so how do those people deal with the natural needs of their babies? We did some research and came across the notion of diaper free babies, dubbed Elimination Communication (EC).

Read more about their story…

I’ve ‘met’ the enthusiastic Kyra of Bubbalooba while developing some fab content for my next project My Green Nappy.

She’s currently running a Giveaway – that ends TODAY!

I only just happened to pop over as I visit FaceBook this morning to post about a great post on breastfeeding I found online.

So pop over and register your entry for a chance to win some Modern Cloth Nappies from this great Aussie mum.

Modern Cloth Nappy Giveaway at Bubbalooba Blog…

Being Diaper Free is the DESTINATION, NOT the Starting Point of EC”

Over at Apartment Therapy, Sarah Rae Trover wrote a small piece about EC:

Elimination Communication: Babies That Are Diaper Free.

(Image: Sustainable is Good)

It had this image that I guess contributes the the freaking-out people have, thinking you CAN’T use diapers if doing EC ‘properly’. As I’ve said elsewhere here on the Tribal Baby blog, articles by people doing EC are usually edited for sensationalism. (One I contributed to was so bad I refuse to link to it – even though they didn’t even link to my site in courtesy for my time, nor print my follow-up comment about how CRAP a job they did!) LOL…

As one of the people online helping people to better understand that EC is not an extremist practice, but a fun, casual one, I WISH the subtitle of the image said:

“Before you begin commenting, please realize that:

Here’s the gist of the article:

When we talk about diapers, we’re usually bringing the latest news on cloth, kinda-cloth or eco-friendly disposable options. But what if you never needed to buy diapers? Elimination Communication is starting to be talked about more in social circles, but if you don’t know anyone who’s tried the method it can seem a little archaic. Click through to read a first hand account of this method in action!

The idea behind Elimination Communication is three fold.

• Diapers aren’t exactly eco friendly (even the “green” ones)

• Diapering (cloth or disposable) is money that doesn’t need to be spent

• Training your child to use a toilet, or signal when they need to relieve themselves, isn’t as difficult as you might think.

When we talk about diapers, we’re usually bringing the latest news on cloth, kinda-cloth or eco-friendly disposable options. But what if you never needed to buy diapers? Elimination Communication is starting to be talked about more in social circles, but if you don’t know anyone who’s tried the method it can seem a little archaic. Click through to read a first hand account of this method in action!

The idea behind Elimination Communication is three fold.

• Diapers aren’t exactly eco friendly (even the “green” ones)

• Diapering (cloth or disposable) is money that doesn’t need to be spent

• Training your child to use a toilet, or signal when they need to relieve themselves, isn’t as difficult as you might think.

The first comments (as is usual) pick up that EC is something that MUST be slavishly practiced 24 / 7 and that it involves hovering over your baby’s bottom area staring intently for signs of mess, LOL:

This sounds like such a great idea. I’d love to save the waste and the expense of diapers and just teach my little man to use a toilet, but it just doesn’t seem practical if you have to work or aren’t totally focused on your baby 24/7.

Sounds to me as just another way for certain types of parents to feel superior.

Sounds like a terrible idea — even if it does work well.  So now we have to be focused on our babies’ bums 24-7 for signs of excretion? Who wants to live that way?

It truly is bizarre how people react to a concept new to them – bag it to death! Read the rest here.

Anyway, I added this comment:

Hi Sarah,
Thankyou for helping share the concept of EC to more people – you might just change someone’s life – that’s how empowering and wonderful baby pottying can be!

I’d just like to reiterate that yes, diapers are used when practicing EC in our cultures, I like to say that “diaper free is the DESTINATION, not the starting point”.

Sadly, people think we who do EC simply never diaper our babies and let them then just go where they will – that’s something else – and probably a mess!

Infant Potty training isn’t like that – yep, you can ease into it part time, gradually build up your confidence and REDUCE the number of diapers your baby wears – think of it as keeping the diaper drier for longer.

They will still use the diapers – if it was as easy as not using a diaper, we’d all still be doing it!

I have members at my site practicing EC with their 8th child, their third, as working parents, urban parents – consistency is important, but hey, other kids use diapers full time as a toilet for 3 years and get over it, so peeing in a diaper now and then is no biggie for a baby having EC experiences!

The potty break is simply another activity in their day, a chance for fun, smiling and singing with Mom or Dad or big sibling!

About Potty Songs: http://www.parttimeec.com/potty-songs-for-baby-pottying-babies.htm

Charndra

Alcohol and Co-Sleeping Affect Risk for SIDS

So apparently there is a new British study that showed co-sleeping may account for more than half of deaths from SIDS, but that in most cases the problem was the parent’s use of drugs and alcohol.  (I’ll pop in the link when I find it!)

I was asked to talk about it to the ABC News in New York, but missed the time window due to being on the other side of the world, and also out all day!

Here is the finished article:

Study Unravels Why Bed Sharing Raises SIDS Risk in Some Cases but Not Others

By Lauren Cox, ABC Online

I thought I’d ramble on here about it anyway, LOL:

Yes we do practice sleep sharing – I actually do it (partly of course) to PROTECT my kids from the risk of Cot Death!

Yes, I would dispute that half of sids cases are due to sleep sharing. Certainly not sleep sharing as recommended with safety considered.

They may be due to unsafe practices like sleeping on a lounge or chair with an infant, parents who smoke, are very obese or use drugs, are heavily medicated/extremely overtired or had been drinking (all things NOT recommended in bed sharing)

A friend of mine went to  a conference where she heard that if the baby who dies in a cot death in the UK had shared sleep with the parent in the last SIX WEEKS then a cot death was categorised as due to sleep sharing / overlaying.

DER! What on Earth? I can’t even think of why that could possibly make ANY sense!

Of course, this is the normal way of infant sleep – with the mother. It aids breastfeeding ease, offers Mum / Mom LOTS more sleep, and is just GREAT! Done throughout time of course, and has got a bad rap in part from a stage in history when people would smother unwanted infants (due to poverty and so on) and then claim they ‘rolled on the baby’. Of course, babies would shriek and yell and wriggle! We are not unconscious when asleep – we are just sleeping, so we are aware. That’s why we don’t fall out of bed!

There are lots of studies about bed sharing. My favourite resources are at The Natural Child Project. It may not ever be a practice that can be widely recommended I would say purely because there are contra-indicators, and there are plenty of people around who DON’T read and follow safety recommendations – so perhaps their kids are safer in a cot. Though the number of injuries and deaths that occur don’t seem to get much air-play, as they are just ‘accidents’ and cot sleeping is the norm.

Even though most babies in the world sleep with their mothers / parents and cot death is very rare in such countries.

Charndra

Our experiences of Sleep Sharing / co sleeping / bed sharing can be found here:

Sleep Sharing at Tribal Baby…

There are lots of links to interesting resources about the topic.

I also have a page on the topic of feeding to sleep. I love it, have NO IDEA why people are so scared of it. Mental.

I thought I’d excerpt a couple of excellent replies:

SIDS, by definition, is an infant death with NO other identifiable cause. A child who is smothered in bedding or rolled over on by an intoxicated parent or who falls out of bed or gets strangled is NOT a SIDS death.

The best evidence suggests that a propensity to SIDS is inborn, an immaturity of the central nervous system that causes a child to be unable to reliably regulate its own breathing. This is why things like monitors that provide stimulation when respiration slows or stops or fans running in the immediate environment are preventative….they provide external stimulation that helps regulate the infant’s arousal/CNS response. Of course, co-sleeping does the same thing, by providing the feel and movement of another body, sounds of respiration, external stimulation during sleep instead of absolute stillness and silence. (something only human infants, of all primates, impose upon their infants…other primate infants are carried/kept close to the mother or others constantly, and given that due to our large brain size, most primates are born “premature” as far as brain development goes, this is probably an adaptation that is optimum for maximum survival).

Both mine (now 17 and 10) co-slept from birth (born at home) until toddlerhood with no problems. We made sure the bed and bedding was SAFE and didn’t lay down intoxicated. Since co-sleeping IS such a common practice, even in the US where it is frowned upon, more emphasis needs to be placed on educating parents about how to SAFELY co-sleep rather than just telling them not to. But again, deaths due to unsafe co-sleeping are NOT SIDS.

Recently completed college coursework in child development. Our text cites some interesting and thought provoking statistics pertaining to SIDS. In 1990 approximately 5000 American babies died of SIDS, equating to a 1-in-800 SIDS fatality rate. Other European countries (Canada, England, Australia etc) reported similar fatality rates. These high rates have since been reduced by nearly half.

The practice of having infants sleep on their backs clearly reduced SIDS. Interestingly, Chinese babies have a dramatically lower occurrence of SIDS, 1-in-3000 fatality rate.

Our college text indicates that a major likely cause of SIDS is “deep sleep”, with contributory factors being “long periods of enforced quiet, ‘long periods of lone sleep …’”, and a diet of difficult to digest cow’s milk versus breast milk. All factors leading to deep sleep. While the research didn’t specifically apply to “co-sleeping” as a cause of SIDS, it certainly doesn’t seem to support the “European model” as cited in the lead paragraph of this article.

Blogging Nightline: Elimination Communication at Apartment Therapy

We watched with interest an episode of Nightline last week discussing Elimination Communication. What is that you ask?

It’s a diaper-free method of parenting that requires you to listen and communicate with your baby in order to figure out when she needs to pee or poo. The ultimate in greenness, no?

Lots of practicing parents chimed in with their positive experience, the usual nay-sayers making their astoundingly repetitious and ignorant statements.

My Response was to the question:  ”Is there an age at which you should start your baby?”

Hi Janie,
You can start using the elimination communication method whenever it feels like the right time, though it is ‘easier’ before say 6 months as they go often enough that you have plenty of opportunities to ‘connect’ the action and the cue (wees and poos to perhaps a sound or word cue)

- Though lots of cultures start around that time as baby is sitting up and NOT wetting so much!

Many ways. EC is ‘better’ for those families practicing it – that is why they do it!

May I offer a link to my resources helping families ease into EC part-time? I am really enthusiastic about helping families ease into baby pottying as a way to reduce diaper washing and waste.

I have put together a free introductory series of emails – a guided tour about the best attitudes to adopt when beginning EC.  It’s very popular!

Here:
http://www.parttimediaperfree.com/
http://www.parttimediaperfree.com/Modern-Cloth-Diapers.htm

Thanks,
Charndra

Offering Baby a Potty Break Can Reduce Your Overall Use of Diapers

RA – Rant Ahead! LOL…

The thread was clearly taking a shot at another member of the site, but as I only popped in on the EC thread, I have no idea who they were bagging, I only hope they didn’t come across it.

Let’s see some of the comments made about EC at this site:

EW, and double EW.

To save money on diapers? That’s horrible.

I loled at how she talked about how her husband isn’t as good at reading cues. Uh yeah probably because he has better things to do than sit around waiting for his child to make the sh!t or pee pee face.

I will never in a thousand years understand EC.

WTF is elimination communication?

I can’t see racing my shitting child to a toilet when she makes poop face.

Well, this is probably a useful tool if you live, for example, in the Kalahari where it is sometimes difficult to obtain diapers, I imagine. But not having to live in filth is one of the great advantages of modern life; I can’t imagine choosing to live like this, getting shat or pissed upon multiple times per week, cleaning up all that stuff etc when you inevitably miss.

For some reason I had a moment and felt in the mood to actually say something! Although there were no nasty responses, which was a relief, though I did aim to keep it civil though pointed out a differing point of view! Usually I am just writing to the people reading who might actually be interested in the concept despite the herd mentality ‘follow the leader’ bagging of something different…

Here was my response:

Wow, that’s so amazing that you are sooooo closed minded and judgemental about something before having ANY idea of what it is!

Do you PREFER wiping poo off your baby’s private parts on a daily basis for several YEARS?

I don’t, so we practice EC and REDUCE or minimize the number of poopy diapers we need to deal with. We also catch many wees in the potty as well – several over the day, reducing the overall number of diapers we need to use / wash / buy.

Shock horror, but yes, your baby wears a diaper between potty visits, imagine that!

So, anyone reading who isn’t freaked out by the idea of changing less diapers and reducing the time your child is in them overall, visit this article:

People practicing EC simply offer their baby a potty break at changes, when they wake up, when they are fussing, it is that simple. ‘Misses’ go in the diaper. No racing of a child to the adult toilet.

Of course, if you want to let them go wherever they will, you can, but that isn’t EC – that’s just leaving the diaper off and cleaning up.

Part Time Diaper Free! will introduce those with a more open mind to the concept.

Visit the whole thread at The Nest…

Take a look at: Offering Baby a Potty Break Can Reduce Your Overall Use of Diapers I had this article published at The Cloth Diaper Whisperer Blog in the USA.

Elimination Communication is a perfect companion to using cloth diapers, as you can reduce your washing load while helping ease the ecological footprint of your family even more, which is no doubt among the many reasons you made the switch to cloth in the first place!

You use cloth diapers. They are a better choice environmentally, using 40% less resources than their disposable counterparts. Even part time use of cloth is a wonderful gesture towards reducing waste.

Baby Pottying, also called “Potty Whispering” or Elimination Communication, is an ancient world wide practice that was so common it had no name, even until a couple of generations ago. We all know how disposable diapers exploded onto the market, and throwaway’s soon became the largest contributor of trash thrown out of car windows and found along highways! (Ewww)

Making toilet learning a natural part of their learning process just like anything else is key to not having to stress over ‘potty training’.

Our babies gradually and slowly learn to eat, crawl, play, talk, walk

- they can learn to use the toilet in much the same naturally evolving way. You may need to get a few paradigm shifts going to help them though, as our society currently favours doing nothing but cleaning up after them until they are 3 or more.

By starting as early as you like by giving your baby daily diaper free time you are helping them stay aware of the processes of their body, rather than ‘numbing them’ with a disposable diaper.

By offering your baby the opportunity to pee in a baby potty when they wake up with a dry diaper and as you wait for their bath to fill means the potty is a familiar bit of household furniture – there is no uncertainty around it, nothing to ‘learn’.

You’ll catch pees and poops this way; have a cheer! Sing a potty song! Your baby then toddler will feel happy and relaxed about using a toilet place. Potty Cheers are little ditties to sing when they do a wee in the potty, my sons love them! I’ve collected over 40 potty songs and cheers at http://www.PartTimeDiaperFree.com

You will feel calm and relaxed about a gradual path to toilet independence, and not stressing about having to suddenly ‘train’ your child that going in their pants is no longer an option now that they are ‘x’ in age.

Washable Training Pants are a great option for the transition to regular underwear, too. www.parttimeec.com has a huge visual directory of the wide variety now available.

Charndra

Making toilet learning a natural part of their learning process just like anything else is key to not having to stress over ‘potty training’.

Our babies gradually and slowly learn to eat, crawl, play, talk, walk

They can learn to use the toilet in much the same naturally evolving way. You may need to get a few paradigm shifts going to help them though, as our society currently favours doing nothing but cleaning up after them until they are 3 or more.

By starting as early as you like by giving your baby daily diaper free time you are helping them stay aware of the processes of their body, rather than ‘numbing them’ with a disposable diaper.

By offering your baby the opportunity to pee in a baby potty when they wake up with a dry diaper and as you wait for their bath to fill means the potty is a familiar bit of household furniture – there is no uncertainty around it, nothing to ‘learn’.

You’ll catch pees and poops this way; have a cheer! Sing a potty song! Your baby then toddler will feel happy and relaxed about using a toilet place. Potty Cheers are little ditties to sing when they do a wee in the potty, my sons love them! I’ve collected over 40 potty songs and cheers.

You will feel calm and relaxed about a gradual path to toilet independence, and not stressing about having to suddenly ‘train’ your child that going in their pants is no longer an option now that they are ‘x’ in age.

Washable Training Pants are a great option for the transition to regular underwear, too. www.parttimeec.com has a huge visual directory of the wide variety now available.

Charndra

Elimination Communication Simplified

A simple ’standard’ article written about EC – I don’t think it is written by a parent practicing elimination communication, due to phrases like “these parents claim”. More likely an article for SEO – as it is heavy on certain terms that don’t quite read right!

A couple of excerpts:

EC’ing has been used for as long as there have been babies. It is basically recognising the signs that your child needs to answer the call of nature, or to put it another way, “use the potty”.

To Use a Diaper or Not

One reason some parents choose the EC method is because it can reduce the need for diapers. Although, in the early stages, you will probably need some backup by having a clean diaper in your bag, the possibility of not having to buy diapers is very appealing. Some parents find that using cloth diapers enhances their children’s success with elimination communication due to the fact that they can feel the results of elimination.

Read the entire article…

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Thanks for Visiting the Tribal Baby blog   

If you’re new to the idea of Elimination Communication, please pop over to one of my sites and join my free guided tour on Baby Pottying, “The 7 Secrets to EC Confidence” to get you started out right!  Part Time Nappy Free! Or Part Time Diaper Free!

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