The Detroit Free Press has a story today about Baby Pantry, a program to help working families with the expense of diapers for their children.

A snippet:

Created two years ago, the Baby Pantry is a nonprofit organization with one goal: to buy diapers for needy families.

“There are shelters to go to when you need a bed, food stamps to help you eat and places that will give you clothing. But there was no place for needy families to get diapers,” says Julia Halpin, 43, who formed the Baby Pantry after hearing from her sister, a social worker, about the financial struggles of families with diaper-age children.

Right now, this program is limited to Oakland County families, specifically those in the St. Joseph Mercy Oakland program. But the goal is to reach out to other communities in Southeast Michigan.

A snippet from the agency’s web site:

Most parents of young children agree that they celebrated the day their child became potty-trained. It not only marked an important milestone in their child’s development, but it also marked the day an extra $20.00 to $25.00 per week could be earmarked for some other part of the family budget. Now imagine how a parent who is facing a lay-off or is underemployed feels about this weekly purchase. A baby pantry that provides diapers to parents facing these economic hardships is filling a very important basic need and is relieving parents’ stress.

The newspaper article, and the agency’s web site, explain pretty clearly that many low-income working families have to use disposable diapers rather than cloth diapers.

When you live in an apartment or home that does not have laundry hookups, as many low-income families do, your laundry has to be washed in a public laundry facility. That service gets really expensive, very fast.

When I had just my daughter and I to care for, I was washing six loads of laundry a week for our regular clothes – and that’s without the additional laundry load of cloth diapers. I was not able to move into a home with laundry hookups until the child was 3.

And when your child is in day care while you work, many caregivers insist on disposable diapers for sanitary and logistical reasons.

Now, before there’s a flood of comments about not having a baby before you can care for it, let me make it perfectly clear that I was married and working full-time with my husband attending community college / working part-time when our daughter was born. At the time, there was no concern about “affording a child.”

My family and financial circumstances changed drastically when my daughter was a year old. I did not remarry until she was nearly 5.

So it should be no surprise that I celebrated quite a bit when the daughter was potty-trained at age 3. Not only could I kick the diaper cost, I could also place her in a less expensive day care program.

And with the layoff and unemployment problems plaguing southeast Michigan families right now, a lot of parents are finding themselves in financial situations that “were not in the plan.”

In the meantime, Julie’s List has a page on crisis pregnancy agencies and resources in southeast Michigan. Depending on where you live and what programs you qualify for, southeast Michigan families can get help with diapers, formula, parenting classes and other services from these agencies.