“Teaching children healthy habits is especially important at the age when they’re learning basic life skills. We teach them to compost, recycle, respect nature, eat healthy and organic/local, grow their own food, conserve water and reduce waste. Using cloth diapers in our daycare center is a huge part of practicing what we teach…and we produce so much less waste than other centers. We’re teaching social responsibility.”

Unfortunately, not all daycare providers see cloth diapers quite this way – yet. The Real Diaper Association and the Real Diaper Industry Association have been working on several related activities to facilitate the use of cloth diapers in daycare. A big step is recognizing that there are a lot of daycare providers already using or accepting cloth diapers. Finding those daycares, though, frequently takes a lot of effort – - until now…

The new Cloth-Diaper-Friendly Daycare Directory is now live and ready for you to use!

While RDA received some tips in their 2007 survey about cloth diapers in daycare, the information is old so we need your help in finding cloth-diaper-friendly daycare providers to include in the directory. This directory is ready to fill a major need that we’ve been hearing about at RDA since our founding. But it is absolutely reliant on the public to populate the data and make it as useful as it can be!!!

WE NEED YOUR INFORMATION!

• If your child wears (or wore) cloth diapers in daycare, take a minute to add as much information as you can about that daycare to the directory.
• If you know someone who uses cloth diapers in daycare, go to the directory and click on the Share links at the bottom of the page to send an email or Facebook message to that person asking them to contribute information to the directory.
• If you are a daycare provider who accepts children in cloth diapers – or, better, PROVIDES cloth diapers for the children in your care – BY ALL MEANS, add your information to this directory!
• If you own a diaper service proving cloth diapers to a local daycare provider(s), add their information to the directory, or share the link with them (daycare.realdiaperindustry.org) so they can add themselves.
• If you are merely sympathetic to the cause of cloth diapers in daycare, share the link to the directory (daycare.realdiaperindustry.org) in any way you can.

If you’re looking for a daycare in your area that accepts your cloth diapers and nothing appears in the directory for your area (yet), the joint RDA/RDIA project team published a tip sheet for parents about how to ensure a caretakers’ acceptance and use of cloth diapers for a child in their care. Hopefully, it will result in acceptance of your cloth diapers, and you’ll be able to soon return to the directory to add your provider!

Heather McNamara
Executive Director, Real Diaper Association (Associate Member)
Chair, RDA/RDIA Cloth Diapers in Daycare Project

Cross-posted with RDA.

Having said that, I haven’t used daycare for my children, so when it came time to put together recommendations for the many parents who contact us about information to use in daycare selection conversations, the best sources were the moms who had done it. The Real Diaper Association (RDA) conducted a survey on the use of cloth diapers in daycare facilities. We received over 250 detailed responses. The responders were largely parents who had talked with daycare providers about their willingness to use cloth diapers on their children while caring for them. We culled the best advice they had, and came up with this tip sheet for using reusable cloth diapers in daycare.

The tip sheet includes practical advice about finding a daycare provider and talking with them about cloth diapers, and specific options you could consider to make it work for both of you. It also has links for parents to inform themselves about state daycare regulations and about proper sanitation practices for changing diapers in a daycare facility.

This tip sheet represents the first step in a joint project by volunteers from RDA (Real Diaper Association) and RDIA (Real Diaper Industry Association). Follow ongoing efforts to facilitate the use of cloth diapers in daycare at the RDA website or on this blog. Many thanks go to Ann Maclean, Northern Virginia Real Diaper Circle Leader, and RDA volunteers Angie Gregory and Ada Vaughan for all the work they did in putting it together.

Heather McNamara
Executive Director, Real Diaper Association
Chair, RDA/RDIA joint committee on Cloth Diapers in Daycare

Cloth Diapers in Daycare cross-posted at Real Diaper Events, the Real Diaper Association blog.