Social Diapers

My husband and I have been mulling over the topic of diapers for our little one. While we'd like to do something "green," maybe use cloth diapers, we realized we have no clue what we're doing. We have never had the responsibility of diapering a little one, so saying we'll do cloth diapers is really making a commitment we weren't sure we are ready to make.

Plus, the more we read about cloth diapering, the more we realized how much of a disadvantage our living situation in Norway put us at. Instead, we decided to try regular disposable diapers and see if we could come up with some more ecologically conscious solutions down the road.

Then we started to wonder how much these disposable diapers were going to cost. If there's one thing I've heard parents in America lament over and over again, it's the cost of diapers. Knowing how much more expensive everything in Norway is, we were both rather worried about how we were going to afford these presumably astronomically expensive diapers.

Turns out the cost of diapers in Norway is nearly the same as what it is in the states. After we finished rejoicing and dancing about, we started to wonder how this could be. In a country where everything is at least twice the price as the same thing in America, how can diapers be nearly the same?

Our only guess is that the government subsidizes diapers here. There are so many government benefits and legal protections for parents, we imagine that cheap diapers are just another service they offer.