Infants use about 240 diapers per month. A year’s supply of diapers costs $936. That means a single mother mother working full time at the minimum wage can expect to spend 6 percent of her annual pay on Pampers alone.
Meanwhile, the two biggest programs that assist low-income mothers, SNAP (food stamps) and WIC, don’t cover diapers or baby wipes.
That might be why, in a study of 877 pregnant and parenting women published inPediatrics in 2013, a team of researchers found that needing diapers and not being able to buy them was a leading cause of mental health problems among new moms.
For the study, Megan Smith, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, approached women in New Haven, Connecticut, and asked them one simple question:
“If you have children in diapers, do you ever feel that you do not have enough diapers to change them as often as you would like?”
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea.../diaper-need/399041/]
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