Reading Time: 3 minutes When To Change Cloth Diapers Answered Simply
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How do you know when to change your baby when they wear cloth diapers? How do you know when a cloth diaper is wet? Knowing when to change a disposable diaper is easy. Disposable diapers puff up when wet.
Disposables also have a line that changes color when they are wet. This isn’t the case with cloth diapers. Cloth diapers are puffy even when dry. They are even referred to as fluff, because their little booties appear fluffed up.
Cloth diapers don’t have a magical line that changes colors. So how do you know when to change them. The best clue? Time.
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When To Change Cloth Diapers
So how do you tell when cloth diaper is wet? The answer is in the question. The answer is “when”. With cloth diapers it’s just a time issue. This is easier than it sounds. In general your child is going to be pretty regular.
You feed them at the same time most of the time. They are in a digestive (eat/drink->poop/pee) routine so much more than older kids and adults. When they are going to go potty and when they are going to poop ends up being pretty predictable.
How Often To Change Cloth Diapers
How often you need to change cloth diapers depends on their age. Newborns will need their diaper changed every 1-1.5 hours during the day. Infants and toddlers will need their diapers changed every 2-4 hours during the day.
Odds are low you will want to change diapers overnight once they’re around a year. (But when they wake up in the middle of the night crying and you’ve tried everything else, sometimes it is a diaper change they want).
You’ll want to change their diapers when they first wake up in the morning. Likewise change their cloth diapers when they wake up from naps.
How often should a cloth diaper be changed? Regularly.
How To Know When To Change Cloth Diapers
How do you know when to change a cloth diaper? It’s easy to know if there is poop in a diaper. Just take a peak or sniff. Your eyes and nose will be right. Taking a peak is much easier with cloth diapers than it is with disposables.
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Cloth diapers are elastic so you just pull back it a tad above the booty and see what’s going on. To know when to change urine, just know it’ll be an hour or so after they drink.
The easiest way to know when to change a toddler’s diaper is to simply ask them. It seems like many parents become extremely dependent on disposable diapers because of their magical line that changes colors. But you don’t need that.
Communicate with your child. They’ll very quickly learn how to answer yes or no to asking them if their diaper is wet. Our children before they were two would answer “is there poop in there” accurately almost every single time (“No poop just pee” was a regular line in our house.)
It turns out not even children want to have a wet diaper on longer than necessary. Parents of disposable diapers don’t ask this question nearly as often. Instead they rely on a magic line instead of communication.
A Note About Diaper Rash
Regardless of whether you use cloth diapers or disposables, do not go too long between diaper changes. If you wait too long then your baby will develop diaper rash from having the moisture up against their body too long.
Delaying a diaper change because you are too busy doing something isn’t worth the headache you’ll have trying to help your baby deal with diaper rash. Plus, it isn’t fair to your baby to have a booty hurting!
Bottom Line
Knowing when to change a disposable diaper is easy. They have color coding and they poof up. Those clues don’t exist for cloth diapers. To know when to change cloth diapers, just do it every couple of hours until your kiddos can tell you when they’re ready.
Happy Fluffing!
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