Susan Campbell: Diapers Can Be Underpinning Of A Household

Sometimes, the smallest thing can make all the difference.

Take, for instance, the math of a diaper.

A disposable diaper costs roughly 20 cents. Babies need 6 to 12 of them a day, at a cost of $70 or so a month.

More math: The average age for a little girl to toilet train is 29 months. For a boy, it’s 31 months, according to a University of Michigan study. A typical baby, according to Mother Jones magazine, uses 3,800 disposable diapers before toilet training.

(My math places the figure higher. Then again, Mother Jones called infants “planet-pummeling joy.” What a bunch of buzz-kills.)

Whatever your math, here’s why diapers matter:

Since its beginning in 2004, the North Haven-based Diaper Bank of Connecticut has supplied some 22 million diapers to partner agencies around the state. Those agencies then distribute the diapers to families who need them.

It’s just a diaper, but a little thing like a fresh one can carry more than one kind of load: A fresh diaper can get a parent back to work, or put a parent who’s pursuing a degree back in the classroom. A diaper can also prevent significant health issues for a baby or toddler.

The diaper bank’s motto is “Change from the bottom up,” and the organization’s small staff is proud of its work, said Janet Stolfi Alfano, executive director, who also sits on the board of the National Diaper Bank Network.

Recently, the organization commissioned the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis to measure its reach, and here’s what they found: Free diapers — which Alfano’s organization calls a basic human need — allow parents to place children in adequate child care, which allows the parents to go to work, and children to go to decent day care programs. Free diapers cut medical costs, and reduce the amount of significant, life-long health effects of a dirty diaper.

The diaper report, co-authored by Fred Carstensen, director of the center, and Peter Gunther, senior research fellow, said that every dollar invested in diaper assistance yields an 11-times increase in the personal income of recipients.

Greater personal income also means more taxes paid to the state.

That boost is crucial in Connecticut, where so many infants and toddlers live in families with significant financial challenges, says Merrill Gay, executive director of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, who spoke as part of a panel at the study’s release. That’s in the wealthiest state in the union (with an average household income of $73,433, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).

Of the diaper recipients in the report, 60 percent have annual household incomes of less than $20,000, less than the federal poverty level for a family of three. And for all the help the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, which used to be called food stamps) provides, recipients cannot use benefits to buy diapers — or baby wipes.

According to Cosmeque Hall, data coordinator at the maternal infant outreach program at Hartford’s health and human services department, in some households money is so tight that parents must choose between paying rent and buying a box of diapers. Hall, who was also on the panel at the study’s release, said that meeting the high cost of this basic need contributes to a mentality middle-class and upper-middle-class families never know.

She tells people who pass through her office, “You can’t stay stuck.”

The study said that free diapers decrease by a third the number of doctor and hospital visits by children with diaper rash. Free diapers significantly decrease other diaper-related health issues, including upper urinary tract infections, a recurrence of which can lead to lifelong kidney damage. All told, free diapers saved nearly $400,000 annually on doctor visits and medicines.

The study also said parents who used out-of-home child care (where families must supply their child’s diapers) missed an average of four days of work or school per month because they couldn’t afford a box. That inevitably leads to job loss; few employers will allow a worker to miss four days in a month, and education suffers when a student isn’t in class.

Co-author Gunther said he was struck by how many diaper recipients were working or intensely looking for work. “These weren’t people who were specializing in freeloading,” he said. “They were really trying to make ends meet.”

In short: A diaper made all the difference, from the bottom up.

Susan Campbell teaches at the University of New Haven. She is the author of “Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl” and “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker.” Her email address is slcampbell417@gmail.com.