The Sustainable Baby Chronicles #1: Thoughts on sustainability after a one month of being a baby-dad.
Learning To Dad-mode
My newborn baby son, Jin, just turned one-month old.
He’s doing great: he’s eating a ton, he’s super healthy, he sleeps a lot, and he’s learning so much about the world. We love him more than anything!
Me, on the other hand, well…I’m…surviving: I never sleep more than 2 hours at a time, I half-zombie walk through my days, I’m eating less healthy, and tension is running higher than usual at home…Welcome to having a newborn!
I could write a long post about how it feels to be a father, and both the joy and stress a newborn brings to your life, but this is a sustainability blog so I’m going to stick to the sustainability aspects of raising a newborn.
Early warning: it’s not pretty.
Also, just to be 100% clear right from the get-go, I do not in any way see my baby as “bad for the planet”, regret having him, or see his existence as anything short of a miracle of life that I’m unendingly grateful for. It’s because I love him that I worry about the future of the planet and want to change culture and mindsets to reduce the enormous amounts of pollution we emit daily from our everyday actions, including raising babies unsustainably. Because I love him, I want to find a better, less polluting way to raise a baby that can hopefully become a model for others and a better, cleaner world for him.
Baby Products = Convenience = Waste
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from raising a baby for a month, it’s that the entire world of baby goods are designed with one thing in mind: mom and dad’s convenience. For more than obvious reasons. Raising a baby is hard: How much do you feed them? What do you teach them and when? How do you stop them from crying? How do you get anything else done when this thing is crying all the time? How do you even function on this little sleep? The difficulties are endless, and you absolutely get to the point where you will pay any amount of money to make it easier.
Unless you’re a sustainability nerd.
All the convenient products on the market usually mean a lot more single/short-term-use plastic (bottled formula, diapers, plastic bottles that they grow out of within a month), which, for someone who thinks a lot about what a sustainable life looks like, means a lot of feeling gross about it.
For today’s post, I’m just going to keep it general on how raising a baby with sustainability in mind is going: what’s been good, what’s been bad, and what’s been absolutely terrible when it comes to raising a baby sustainably.
The Good
One of the ways in which I’ve succeeded the most is in buying baby products used. Everything out there is designed to be used for a maximum of 3 months: clothes, bottles, beds, rocking chairs, toys…The baby outgrows them all at a ridiculous pace. However, I bought over 80% of it second-hand. Because of the short-term-usage nature of baby products, there is no shortage of lightly used baby stuff online, and I was able to snag tons of clothes, a rocking chair, a high chair, and a bunch of toys for a tiny fraction of what they would have cost new. This means more use out of less stuff before they go into the trash (just to be clear, I don’t plan on trashing these, but giving them away or selling them). Big win!
The Bad
There are a lot of products that I just don’t have control over…Best represented by…Baby formula. We are breastfeeding, but we haven’t gotten to high enough levels of production that we can go without store-bought baby formula. You can’t make it at home, not to mention I don’t think I’d trust any home-made formula I could possibly make. So the best I can do is just buy in as large of a size as I can and try to go for economies of scale: lots of baby formula for one package. Clothes are another must-have…In just one month of the baby’s life, he’s already grown out of a lot of what we got, used or otherwise…some only worn once or twice. Buying used helps, but it still feels like there’s more than can be done here. They just grow so fast!
The Ugly
By far the most uncomfortable part of it is…you guessed it…The diapers. At some point I want to do a more in-depth post on diapers, so for now I’m not going to go into it. For now, all you need to know is that diapers are made entirely of plastic (I checked…I thought there’d be a good amount of paper in these things, but NOPE), and babies go through ~10 of them a day. ~70 a week. 280 a month…It’s a LOT of additional plastic that goes into the garbage every single day…And when I think about the fact that 4 babies are born every single second of every day…That number gets astronomically large really fast.
The good news here is that there are some relatively sustainable options available, and I intend to try every one. I definitely see this as my single greatest challenge to overcome. In the coming months, I WILL reduce this waste by as much as I possibly can.
Full Disclosure: I’m not sure I can raise a baby sustainably.
So that’s it: my baseline thoughts on the intersection of raising a newborn and sustainability. Raising a baby is hard. Raising it 100% sustainably? Insane-mode. But as far as I know, no one out there has figured out how to raise a baby sustainably in the modern developed world, so if you know any potential role models here, drop a line in the comments below!
There’s a lot of work to be done here, and I feel like I’m in a constant state of “running on fumes,” but if there’s one thing I know from my experiences in sustainability so far, it’s that if I can overcome the challenges, my life will feel better for it: I’ll be happier and more fulfilled.
I take solace in knowing there is more than a glimmer of hope: humans raised babies sustainably for about 300,000 years, so there’s definitely a precedent. It’s only the past 60 years or so that we’ve become really unsustainable. In some ways it means looking to the past, but it also means trying to reforge our old sustainable ways with imbued new knowledge; after all, we don’t want to go back to the days of “1-in-10 babies dying before the age of one.” I think it’s safe to say there must be a perfect combination of sustainable practices and cleanliness that will get to a way of raising a baby that is good for the baby, good for the planet, and good for my sanity.
Good luck, me.
Thanks for reading, everyone!
