Diaper Rash – how to recognize it

New parents have a lot of cause to be concerned about their baby’s health. Visiting any page with even just the regular things that can – and do – happen to most babies is enough to drive someone to distraction. Even non-parents would be hard pressed not to shudder in sympathy. Something as common as diaper rash, which affects most babies at some point in some measure, is still too much for any parent to bear with real composure. Knowing how to recognize diaper rash, and prevent it getting worse, is something that all parents will be well served by in the early life of their baby.

The diaper area of a baby will, unavoidably, come into contact with some bacteria on a regular basis. Even regular changes and cleaning can sometimes fail to pick it up. You will know when your baby has diaper rash, as it is characterized by skin in the diaper area appearing red and inflamed, and in some cases coming up in pimples. It will irritate the child and if left unchecked can develop into something worse, including a number of infections. As well as this, it will be obvious to any parent that the child is in quite some discomfort. They will cry more and louder, and show general displeasure. Keeping your baby clean will, however, keep diaper rash from occurring in a severe manner or too often, and swift corrective action including treatment with a gentle, pH neutral moisturizer will make a real difference, quickly.

How should you bath your baby?

To give your baby a decent bath there are a few things that you must stick to, aside from which you have more or less free rein to do as you wish. The potential for mishaps is taken as read, and no parent will want to take undue risks when washing their baby, so staying away from those is more or less self-explanatory. For simplicity, it is necessary simply to avoid lifting the baby too much – soap and water do not make for easy handling, and dropping your child is a constant and terrifying fear for parents – prevention is, in this case, a straightforward matter.

In the first six months of your baby’s life, a water depth level of approximately five inches will be fine. The temperature should be somewhere in the region of body temperature – slightly above is best (around 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) as the water will cool from the moment it is in contact with the bath. You can then put your baby in the bath, using one hand to hold up his or her neck and head and avoid it getting bumped. You then wash him or her with a soft handcloth and a small amount of soap. Moistened cotton wool should be used to clean their face, and to moisten any dried mucus before wiping that away.

Rinsing away all soap and any remaining dirt requires a clean facecloth, and then you can dry him or her with a small towel which you can use to wrap him or her. Then you can use a mild moisturizer in order to keep his or her skin soft.

Bathing Your Baby

How often should you bathe your baby? It is a question that a lot of new parents ask themselves and others when they have their first child. There are two separate questions in this. Firstly, how often is often enough, and second, how often is too often? While there is some belief that you can never be too clean, the fact is that your skin – and your baby’s – provides natural protection through bodily oils, which prevent infection and irritation being caused by clothing and everyday dirt. Bathing overly often will strip those oils and lead to increased irritation, and is therefore a bad thing.

Some people think that a daily bath is necessary, but for a child this is not really the case. In fact, cleansers and water can damage your baby’s skin if used too frequently. If you must bathe the baby daily, then you must use a gentle cleanser like a mild soap designed specifically for babies to avoid the aforementioned stripping of oils. The parts of a baby that will get dirty quickest are its face, from feeding and general baby activity, and the diaper area. Regularly washing your baby’s face, cleaning up at the time of a diaper change, and cleaning up in case of any other obvious soiling will be more than enough.

There is no stipulated time frame for how often you absolutely must bath your baby. Every other day is really frequently enough as long as you ensure that the baby is generally clean. Babies do seem to enjoy a bath, and find warm water soothing. Even if you like a good hot bath, remember that your baby’s skin is more sensitive, and just above tepid will more than suffice.

Be Prepared

If you are out and about on the move with your baby, there is every chance that you will need to change their diaper at some point – it is not ideal, as anyone will tell you, to change a diaper in a setting that is outside your home, but sometimes it is simply unavoidable. In this respect, you will need to be prepared. Any trip that you make out of doors with your child will need to be planned with a good deal of awareness of what it takes. The first thing to be aware of is that you will need to take quite a few things, but they need to be easily portable – so taking just the right amount is crucial.

Firstly, you will obviously need a clean diaper. Ideally, before going out you will have changed your baby to put on a disposable diaper. The reason for this is one of disposal, as throwing away a soiled cloth diaper means you have one less in your rotation, but carrying it around is of course less than desirable. Also for disposal, you may want to carry a bag – not indispensable, but nicer for whoever has to empty the garbage pail in which you dispose of the diaper. As well as this, some moist wipes will help with cleaning your baby’s affected area. A change of clothes is also advisable, in case the old diaper has leaked and soiled the outer clothing. The change should, of course, take place in a public washroom for reasons of privacy and practicality.

Disposable Diapers or Cloth?

There is a quite fierce debate between parents – both long-term ones and new ones – over which type of diaper is better for babies. The two main types of diaper are disposable ones and cloth ones, and both types inevitably have their plus sides and their minus sides. In truth, neither kind is better per se than the other. But depending on your personal outlook on such things, you are likely to lean one way or the other, and make your decision based on that instinct. It then comes down to whether you feel comfortable with your choice after a month or two of putting it into practice.

Disposable diapers have in their favor that they are disposable (obviously). On changing the diaper, you will simply have to put it in the trash and say no more about it. However, as any parent will tell you, children are very productive sources of waste matter, so keeping them in clean diapers can add up to a lot of expense. Cloth diapers are invariably cheaper – although clearly you need to have quite a few if you don’t want to be washing them almost constantly. They also mess up the environment a lot less.

It is up to you to decide which kind of diaper is the best for your purposes and for your purse. Either way, there is work involved and there is expense to take into account. The health of your baby’s skin plays a major part in considerations as well, but at the final analysis you and your baby will be fine as long as you keep on top of things – and if you go with cloth diapers, it is worth still having some disposables around in case of emergencies or when you are on the go.

How often do you change your baby’s diaper?

The question of when to change a baby’s diaper is one that will give a lot of parents pause for thought. If you are to change a diaper every time a baby goes to the toilet in it, the simple fact is that you will end up spending so much on diapers that you will have little left to spend on anything else. Leave it too long, however, and the results are more harrowing than any impact to your bank balance. There is no gentle way to say this, but the bacteria in faeces, when combined with urine, will cause diaper rash – and this is something that anyone who has seen it will do their best to avoid.

For starters, it is important to change your baby’s diaper whenever he or she defecates. This is important for hygiene and comfort, as your baby will be in some discomfort if he or she is made to sit in a dirty diaper. When your baby defecates – and you will know when this has happened – you must change their diaper as promptly as possible. Although urine poses less of a problem, it is still not desirable to leave a child in a diaper that is too wet, even a highly absorbent disposable one.

On average, babies will urinate every one to three hours and defecate several times a day. At regular intervals you must therefore change the diaper. It will save money if you use cloth diapers, however it is important to have several diapers and a washing rotation so that there is always a clean diaper around – so it really is a question of expense versus work.

The right material for baby clothes

It is all too easy to spend a lot of money on baby clothes – especially as there is a tendency for manufacturers at the cheaper end of the market to guarantee itself a profit by spending less themselves on making the clothes. This is regrettable and says a lot about the nastier end of the human condition. Although human beings have made great advances in manufacturing over time, the fact is that synthetic fabrics – though cheaper than naturally made ones – are not as kind to the human skin. If you want to be kind to your baby – who will, it is certain, have softer skin than yours – it is important to buy baby clothes made of cotton, or wool.

Synthetic fabrics are known to be harsh on the skin, and also have a tendency to be more allergenic than natural fabrics due to the chemicals used to make them. The processes used to turn natural ingredients into natural fabrics require a little bit more work, and less chemicals, so they will be more expensive. But set next to the medical bills which can result from a child’s reaction to cheaper fabrics, it could be said that the more natural fabrics you clothe them in are an investment.

The right mix to go for, then, is clothes in a natural fabric which are dyed in a relatively gentle way to be brightly colored. It is well known that children react well to bright colors as a visual stimulus, and consequently they will be happier in such clothes.

Getting the most out of baby clothes

A newborn baby, although one of the most incredible joys in a person’s life, can also present something of a headache. The spending that is required to keep a baby healthy, happy and well-clothed is something that can really mount up and make any parent panic a little bit. There is no doubt whatsoever that some unscrupulous individuals will try to take advantage of this by selling baby gear at extortionate prices and trying to emotionally blackmail parents into spending that kind of money – “if you really care for your baby, you’ll pay whatever it takes” being the rather grubby subtext of their sales pitch.

Paying these people no heed can be difficult, but it really is the best option in the long run. Anyone who tries to tell you that your baby needs what they are selling has run out of more inventive sales techniques and is just a money-grabbing ghoul. You can dress a baby in hand-me-down clothes and they will not be adversely affected physically or mentally. It is one of the last points at which you can observe a total absence of direct peer pressure – your baby doesn’t care a jot if their clothes are not designer and you have not spent every penny you have on them. Let your baby’s happiness be the only important factor in all of this – some shyster’s sales pitch will be no help to anyone but themselves. Giving them what they need does not necessitate spending untold sums on supposedly state-of-the-art baby clothes.

The right clothes

There is an entire industry devoted to baby clothing, and it goes without saying that it does a lot of business given the numbers of babies born to new parents every day around the world. As a new parent, you will naturally want to do everything right, so the question of how to clothe your baby in a way that benefits them will be one of the many at the forefront of your mind. That you are thinking in such a way reflects good parenting instincts on your part, so you are doing things in the right way. And usually, following your instincts will be a good idea.

There is really no way to be absolutely 100% sure about everything before you do it, but there are without doubt certain conventions which, if followed, will increase your chances of getting things right. Apart from anything else, you need to make sure that your baby’s clothes are the right size. Too loose and they will lose out on the warmth which the clothes are designed to give. Too tight and your baby will be uncomfortable – plus you will need to change their clothes more frequently as they outgrow them. Somewhere in between is the best answer.

This is why, at an early stage, it can be highly beneficial to have the good fortune to inherit some older baby clothes. As long as they are clean, they present no health risk, and they will enable you to get a measure of what kind of clothes you will need to buy for your child when you inevitably need to do so.

Blue or Pink?

One of the most familiar traditions when it comes to a new baby is the question of what color to paint their nursery, and what color clothes to buy for them. As the old traditions have it, there are only two options, and these are dependent upon one major factor – the sex of the baby. If your baby is a boy, the tradition claims, he should be clothed in blue. If you have a daughter, then they must be clothed in pink. There is, it has to be said, absolutely no practical reason as a parent for sticking to this, although it does save a few seconds when people meet your baby for the first time and do not have to ask “Is it a little boy or a little girl?”

What can be said for certain is that children do react to colors quite early on, and for reasons best known to themselves will favor certain colors over others. Psychologists will even point to the effect that can be had by color on grown adults, and some sports teams even take it into account when choosing uniform colors. Have you ever seen a professional men’s football team wearing pink jerseys? Clothing your child in a color that they like can, without a doubt, make for a happier baby. Clothing it in the color of your favorite team may have the effect of giving them a liking for that color and therefore that team, but it is a bit underhand. If you are OK with that, go ahead.

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