How disposable diapers quickly made Dr. Spock’s cloth-diaper advice obsolete for baby-boom parents

The article uses Benjamin Spock’s mid-century childcare advice to show how much work cloth diapers once required, from folding and pinning to soaking dirty diapers in covered pails. Within a decade, disposable diapers began replacing that routine, turning a messy household chore into a consumer-product innovation story.

The story highlights how progress often comes from solving ordinary, unpleasant problems rather than from glamorous breakthroughs. Disposable diapers reflect a broader postwar trend toward convenience technologies that saved household labor, especially for mothers, while also creating new tradeoffs around cost and waste.

The smelly baby problem