“The Doctors” and Cloth Diapers

I have to say, I was thoroughly unimpressed with the bit about cloth diapering on “The Doctors” today.  Don’t get me wrong, any publicity on how easy cloth diapering can be is wonderful, but there were several things that didn’t set well in my stomach.  I also love the fact that they didn’t choose any of the “big dogs” in the cloth world, they chose Smartipants, an up and coming diaper.

First of all, why call them reusable?  Yes, they are reusable but that sounds kind of icky.  Even as a proud cloth diapering mom, I squirmed just a bit at the thought of reusing diapers.  Just because they’re not a flat sheet that you fold or a prefold diaper doesn’t mean they’re not cloth.  The beauty of today’s cloth market is the choices that are available.

Second, Dr. Masterson, an obstetrician, just had to open her mouth about how gross cloth diapering is.  Luckily, she chose to only make a couple of comments, but they seemed incredibly uninformed for someone who claims to have used cloth.  If you saw the show and are considering making the switch to cloth, please completely ignore the “buckets of crap everywhere” comment.  As another doctor said, you shake the poo into the toilet.  You don’t have to scrub it off, so it’s not “all over your hands” as she said it was.  A simple search for how to wash cloth diapers will turn up a plethora of websites that instruct you how to wash them.  And as long as you’re careful, you rarely even see stains!

Also, the show seemed rather disjointed.  I understand they have a wide audience to appeal to, but why give cloth diapers a minute out of the hour?  It would be nice if they could figure out a way to give topics more time and have a less generalized theme to the show.  I don’t care about staying sexy over 70, that’s 40 years down the road.  I don’t care if being a nudist will lower my blood pressure, I’m not doing it.  These don’t seem like the type of segments you would expect to see mixed in with ride-on luggage and cloth diapers.