Kids wearing for longer

I didn't RTFT. I think there are several reasons for this, but the main was is life is a lot busier now. Usually, both parents work and they may not have the time to train properly, or wash bedsheets, mattress covers, duvets daily. Using pull ups and diapers longer is the easier option, but sometimes also the sensible option too.

Secondly, children as a population are getting bigger. We now have the entire issue of child obesity going on as well (at least here in the UK). Kids are eating poor diets, which not only leads to obesity but hyperactive bladders, behavioural issues (which make training harder), and sleep problems.

The question is, are kids wearing longer, and if they are, which I think is the case, is it a good or bad thing?
Also will the age keep going up? How will this impact on society ?

jamie72 said:

Baby diapers are getting bigger anyway...

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Any evidence? I don't see Size 7 Pampers on sale at my local grocery store anymore and have yet to see Huggies or Luvs in that size.

Perhaps, but even size 6 and pull up trainer pants and goodnites etc much bigger than when most kids were dry by 2 years old

Don't take this the wrong way, but I hope for a future where potty training is optional and diaper's are normal to wear & using the potty isn't.

~Rob

Looks like we might be heading that way a bit, kids wearing longer, and older people wearing more as well - will not become what everyone does, but not viewed as abnormal

jamie72 said:

The question is, are kids wearing longer, and if they are, which I think is the case, is it a good or bad thing?
Also will the age keep going up? How will this impact on society ?

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is it really such a big deal

I believe life will go on as normal, regarding potty training, but it would still be good to expand to older kids who may need diapers, no matter their size.

With respect to kids wearing diapers for longer: I'm not honestly convinced that much has changed in that regard in the last ten years or so. The last article I read on the subject put the typical potty-training age for a boy at something like 31-38 months, and this University of Michigan medical school page states that "Ninety-eight percent of kids are trained by 36 months of age." Those are numbers I've been seeing for a long while. And contrary to some of the posts in this thread, baby diapers have not been getting larger. Not anytime recently, anyway. If anything, they've been getting smaller. We just had a UK member measure the new Baby Dry "7" diapers, and they're shorter than the Baby Dry 6's we have here in the States. The size numbers can be exciting, but you really do have to look and see what they mean. Cruisers 7 diapers were a big hit among ABDLs when they first came out, but eventually we figured out that they were no larger than a 6 in all other Pampers diapers. Even GoodNites have gotten slightly smaller in recent years, although the weight range hasn't changed in ages.

Public schools are no more tolerant of kindergartners in diapers than they've ever been (to my knowledge), nor is there any less stigma among parents when it comes to having four- and five-year-olds in diapers full time. I'm a parent of two kids, have a large circle of parent-friends, and also have three close family members who are public school teachers--of little kids. If teachers in the area were enduring an influx of diaper-wearing kindergartners, I'm sure I'd hear them whining about it!

The thing that's changed recently is our access to and consumption of mass media, and the fact that isolated cases of kindergartners wearing diapers are easily sensationalized and made known to everybody. That really bloats our senses of how common such things are, but the reality seems to be that they're still uncommon.

Wearing diapers or pull-ups to bed because of bed-wetting is, I'll grant, less stigmatized than ever, but that's easy to rationalize: The fact that bed-wetting is symptomatic of a common developmental delay is now well-known, and on top of that, using diapers to manage it only makes sense. All other options bring considerably more work and frustration.

Still, the topic of older and older...and older...kids wearing diapers is a perennial one here on ADISC. Rather than being rooted in reality, I think it's rooted in our own wishful thinking, and the fact that we've got a great little echo-chamber here. Also, there are some among us who view acceptance of diaper-wearing as a sort of "cause", and perhaps those people see older children in diapers as torchbearers of a sort. The fallacy in that, of course, is comparing a child's needs to our own. I don't see the commonness of bedwetting or an imagined drift in the age of potty-training as any particular advantage to us. Fetishists and age-players are not the same as developmentally-delayed children or children with lazy parents. Let's stop kidding ourselves.

Not to put a damper on this, or anything!

Hey, I said "damper." That's like--my diaper now as opposed to a few minutes ago. Whee!!

A child can still have incontinence issues, not related to potty training, just like an adult might have incontinence issues. I can see, under normal circumstances, that schools would not want to take in kids still in diapers by the arm load. But if the child has a disability, such as a developmental disability, then the child may be in diapers. Also any Kindergarten teacher knows that accidents will still happen.

In the U.K., schools and nursaries are not allowed to turn away children because they are not potty trained

Cottontail said:

Rather than being rooted in reality, I think it's rooted in our own wishful thinking, and the fact that we've got a great little echo-chamber here.

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I think that's fair to say. I would imagine that like any other topic, people latch onto something that confirms what they want to believe, and ignore evidence to the contrary, thus ending up with a skewed sense of what's going on.

My own anecdote on the topic is that my nephew wore diapers to preschool at age 4 initially, because my sister was rather lazy about potty training. But being the only kid in diapers, plus having to step away from having fun to have his diaper changed, he quickly motivated himself to become potty trained. With that, I agree that it's hard to believe that older kids are wearing diapers to school.

jamie72 said:

In the U.K., schools and nursaries are not allowed to turn away children because they are not potty trained

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In America if there is no valid medical reason they are required to be turned down. Mostly due to civil suit happy americans looking to make a quick buck because the nurse fondled and raped their children during a routine diaper change. (Which has happened and parent was charged with falsely accusing the nurse)

Am I the only one who remembers when pampers size 5 first came out? What about size 6, Goodnights maybe?

Of course diapers have been getting bigger. We even have pampers size 7 startirting to be released in a few select areas. This is proof enough. And it's only a matter of time before the US has them as well.

w0lfpack91 said:

In America if there is no valid medical reason they are required to be turned down. Mostly due to civil suit happy americans looking to make a quick buck because the nurse fondled and raped their children during a routine diaper change. (Which has happened and parent was charged with falsely accusing the nurse)

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Oh come now. That certainly isn't the reason, although I know that those sorts of things (lawsuits over touching) have happened. The real reason diapered children aren't generally welcome in public schools is that they never have been, and neither can schools afford to take on that responsibility. There's nobody to do it. School nurses, more often than not, are stretched across multiple schools within a district. After that, you've got a handful of administrative staff, kitchen staff and custodians (also often shared), and teachers. It's difficult to contend that any of those people ought to be responsible for diapering children on a general basis. They've all got job functions that would clearly be adversely affected. And about funding a person (more nurses, perhaps?) to handle the regular changing of diapers: Who'd pass that legislation? Nobody. There's just such a negative stigma attached to the idea of sending a medically able child to kindergarten in a diaper that any budget with that line item would get laughed out of the legislature unless it was accompanied by expert testimony that cast doubt on the reasonableness of expecting five-year-olds to be potty-trained. Good luck with that!

Short of having such a thing in place, however, the cases of diapers in public school are going to be very few and special--disabled children, for instance. In those instances, there will be a specially qualified teacher or perhaps a nurse assigned to deal specifically with that child's needs. It's similar to what is done for hearing-impaired students: The classrooms are not all equipped with wireless mics and headphones. Rather, the district assesses the needs for such things on a student-by-student basis, and only after need has been established are resources allocated--for the particular benefit of the affected student(s).

Still thinking that parents can teach their kids how to change their own diapers.

I've spoken of the possibilities for features earlier.
Maybe you can add scents to them like in Pampers and Luvs to tone down odor.

I have yet to read the full thread but this one applies to me , I had wetting accidents till I was about 12, sadly my parents would not let me wear, damn one time my mom made me sleep on the floor and a another time my grandmother threated to put my wet sheets outside for all my friends to see, I am glad that trend of the stigma seems to be dying out. I stole diapers from my brother and got in trouble for that, I never understood that, at that time a diaper that cost 10 cents would have lessened the stress I went though, even at a young age I taught my self how to change and put on a diaper and I belive that is better then having parents do it, heck you could even use that as a goal for learning, like learning to tie your shoe laces, it gives the child a scence of growing up and less dependence on your parents for stuff like that, I.E, babies have there diapers changed by parents but "big kids" change there own self, heck tying shoes is harder then putting on a diaper.

jamie72 said:

Diaper sizes are getting bigger, and it seems normal for kids to wear much longer than before.
Here in the U.K. there have been surveys that show more and more kids are starting school wearing pull ups, and today I read that nearly half of kids still wet the bed when they start school, not every night, but do sometimes.
Is it the avaibilty if larger diapers and pull ups that lead to kids wearing for longer , or is it a response to a greater need that the manufacturers are responding to.
Looks like loads of kids still wear diapers or pull ups for bed, perhaps it is more acceptable today

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nope I remember them and loved them, easer to make them fit me

jamie72 said:

In the U.K., schools and nursaries are not allowed to turn away children because they are not potty trained

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Neither can public schools in the US. But preschools yes because they are private schools. Other schools that are private can turn away kids including those who are still in diapers. Day cares can turn away kids too because they are also private.

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Slomo said:

Am I the only one who remembers when pampers size 5 first came out? What about size 6, Goodnights maybe?

Of course diapers have been getting bigger. We even have pampers size 7 startirting to be released in a few select areas. This is proof enough. And it's only a matter of time before the US has them as well.

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When did size 5 come out?

I remember size 6 came out in early 1998 because I was still in 6th grade when I saw ads for it on TV.

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Cottontail said:

Oh come now. That certainly isn't the reason, although I know that those sorts of things (lawsuits over touching) have happened. The real reason diapered children aren't generally welcome in public schools is that they never have been, and neither can schools afford to take on that responsibility. There's nobody to do it. School nurses, more often than not, are stretched across multiple schools within a district. After that, you've got a handful of administrative staff, kitchen staff and custodians (also often shared), and teachers. It's difficult to contend that any of those people ought to be responsible for diapering children on a general basis. They've all got job functions that would clearly be adversely affected. And about funding a person (more nurses, perhaps?) to handle the regular changing of diapers: Who'd pass that legislation? Nobody. There's just such a negative stigma attached to the idea of sending a medically able child to kindergarten in a diaper that any budget with that line item would get laughed out of the legislature unless it was accompanied by expert testimony that cast doubt on the reasonableness of expecting five-year-olds to be potty-trained. Good luck with that!

Short of having such a thing in place, however, the cases of diapers in public school are going to be very few and special--disabled children, for instance. In those instances, there will be a specially qualified teacher or perhaps a nurse assigned to deal specifically with that child's needs. It's similar to what is done for hearing-impaired students: The classrooms are not all equipped with wireless mics and headphones. Rather, the district assesses the needs for such things on a student-by-student basis, and only after need has been established are resources allocated--for the particular benefit of the affected student(s).

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If that is true then please tell me how my ex's boyfriend's ex girlfriend's daughter was still able to attend public school and she was still in diapers. She did not have a medical problem, she just wouldn't train and refused to potty train. She would just go in her pull ups and she would just go in her underwear and hide it. Then she was back in real diapers for real around age 11 because she made that choice because the mother was told by a doctor there is no way they can get her to stop doing it so they gave her the choice to wear diapers or she quits and she picked diapers.

I have seen actual photos of the girl and she had a big crotch so it was obvious she was diapered. It looked like she had a big penis so i don't think my ex was making this all up.

Also what if the kid was capable of changing themselves? I am also sure they can't turn away an able bodied normal child with incontinence. That would qualify as a disability and I hear a kid can still get an IEP for it. Even if a kid has epilepsy and they also needed to wear diapers, they still can't be turned away for sure. That would be discrimination.

I once heard of a kid not being potty trained until 2nd grade but I don't know if he was special needs. I was only told some kids are just potty trained late. Plus my brother had a kid in his grade and he also wore diapers and that was back in the 2nd grade for them. He was able bodied.

What would happen if a kid was still in diapers because they wouldn't train and public school turned them away but yet the parents were not able to home school because they need to work to make a living so they can have food on the table and keep a roof over their head? Are the parents going to be arrested for their lack of their child's education? How is the kid still going to go to school? Should CPS come and take the kid away and put them in a home with someone who can do homeschooling?

Calico, I really like your signature saying, it is so much more work to be in diapers 24/7, when my dad called me lazy I almost went off the handle, He now knows what it's like since he has problems now but early on he had no clue to how much work and planning goes into every day activities, that and the cost involved, even cheap adult diapers are not cheap. The money I have spent on diapers alone could have bought a really nice car at this point

Now when I hear parents complain about the cost of there kids diapers I usually find out that they are using "goodnights", pull ups or training pants, those are high cost items, if your kid wets the bed then have them in a real tape on diaper that costs about 10 cents, the other products are at lest 70 cents each and some even more and don't work as well. I can see using pull ups or "good nights" while on a sleep over or a vacation/holiday but at home a true diaper for function and cost is the best way to go

Slomo said:

Am I the only one who remembers when pampers size 5 first came out? What about size 6, Goodnights maybe?

Of course diapers have been getting bigger. We even have pampers size 7 startirting to be released in a few select areas. This is proof enough. And it's only a matter of time before the US has them as well.

Click to expand...

The US already has size 7s, they had them first way back in 2008 I believe