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!!