Community groups in the Berkshires and across the country are aiming to close what’s known as the diaper gap. One Yale University professor is looking at the psychological impact of being unable to afford diapers for a young child.Dr. Megan V. Smith is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. While studying the impacts poverty was having on 2,000 families raising young children near New Haven, Connecticut, Smith discovered about 30 percent of parents said they struggled to afford diapers for their kids.
“If a baby is in a wet diaper, mothers described this problem with not being able to soothe the baby and as a mother to not be able to soothe your baby, that’s really crushes your self esteem and clearly increases your level of stress,” Smith said. “So mothers talked about feeling like there is a lack of self efficacy and they weren’t able to provide for their babies and really started to doubt themselves as mothers.”
After partnering with the National Diaper Bank Network to further the study, Smith says those parents also said they were so worried about not having enough diapers that bonding with their babies and young children fell to the wayside. After the findings were published in the journal Pediatrics, Smith says there was a national response from food pantries, homeless shelters and other community groups expressing a desire to help. Dr. Smith spoke at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge to help kick-off the Berkshire Community Diaper Project, where nearly 13 percent of county residents live in poverty, according to the Census. Marie Rudden, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is a project co-founder.
“People haven’t really caught up with this,” Rudden said. “So if you’re a parent and you can’t afford diapers, it’s terribly embarrassing. Often a parent won’t tell the pediatrician because they feel so embarrassed about it. I guess the reason that the people who have started the project are psychiatrists and psychologists is because it’s a real mental health issue for both parents and the children.”
Since September 2014, the group has raised $2,800 to provide 6,000 diapers. An additional 4,000 have been donated through diaper drives and drop-off bins at schools, churches and businesses. Joanne Goldblum founded the National Diaper Bank Network. Though prices vary state to state, she says a monthly supply of disposable diapers ranges from $50 to upwards of $75.
“Most middle and upper income people think that food stamps or SNAP can be used to buy anything in a supermarket,” Goldblum said. “That’s not the case. There is no state or federal subsidy for diapers or other hygiene products. That always surprises people. The other reason I think that it’s surprising, is that as much as we know that poverty is a significant problem, many people really don’t think of how that shows itself concretely.”
In 2011, Connecticut Congresswomen Rosa DeLauro introduced The Diaper Act to allow states to use federal funding for diapers and related supplies. It has been in a subcommittee since Nov. 2011. A state effort to make diapers tax exempt in Illinois is also in committee. The NDBN has worked to craft legislation in California that would provide additional funding for families to buy diapers, while San Francisco plans to launch a diaper voucher program for those in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program paid for with tax dollars in March 2015, according to Goldblum.
“We here at the National Diaper Bank Network know that there are a lot of different ways to potentially address this issue,” Goldblum said. “We actually think that it is more likely that it will be addressed on a state or county level as opposed to federal.”
Although cloth diapers have been used for years, Goldblum says most laundromats won’t allow them because the water often isn’t hot enough to kill bacteria. Since 2011, the national network has grown from 30 diaper banks to 243 in every state except Hawaii and North Dakota handing out nearly 100 million diapers.
With 20 active volunteers, Rudden says the Berkshire Community Diaper Project hopes to join the national network over the next year.
“We’ve gotten feedback that when people come in and see the diapers they’re just enormously relieved and sort of unburdened saying ‘Oh my God, we haven’t been able to mention this,” said Rudden.
