When Megan Martin’s second child was born, her family had less than $100 a week to spend at the grocery store. And diapers for their two kids ate up more than half that money.
“We had to limit our choices. We ate a lot of pasta. We ate a lot of canned vegetables and canned fruits. We didn’t get a lot of fresher food items,” Martin said.
The average cost for a child’s diapers is about $1,200 a year, and half the families in the U.S. struggle to afford them, according to the National Diaper Bank Network.
An inadequate supply of diapers can hurt young children’s health, if they are kept in soiled ones too long, and impact working parents’ ability to put them in daycare as most centers require families to provide diapers.
To help local families access more diapers, the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County is hosting a diaper drive, which started in December and will end on Feb. 22, hoping to collect 30,000. The diapers will be donated to the Central Florida Diaper Bank, which provides them for free to low-income parents.
Martin, a program director at Winter Park Day Nursery, a childcare center that serves low-income families, knows other parents who stretched their budgets to buy diapers and even met some who delayed changing their child to ration the limited number they could afford.
Most childcare centers require parents to leave a day’s supply — six to eight diapers — when they drop their child off.
If parents cannot provide diapers, they often have to stay home from work, said Jennifer Randles, professor of sociology at California State University, Fresno.
“If you’re trying to go to work to get out of poverty, to get to that next paycheck you’re looking towards, you have to have care for your child,” said Randles, author of the upcoming book, ”Living Diaper to Diaper: The History, Politics, and Inequalities of Diapering.”
While researching her book, Randles talked to families who ran out of diapers and had to stay home and keep their child on a linoleum floor or set them on the toilet every 20 minutes.
“We know that some parents are taking off the diaper, scraping out the feces or ringing out the urine and then putting them back on or flipping them inside out,” she said.
Sharon Lyles, executive director of the diaper bank, said babies and toddlers left in dirty diapers can develop urinary tract infections and rashes. Parents who cannot provide clean diapers often feel stressed and anxious.
She founded the Central Florida Diaper Bank in 1995, after she struggled to buy diapers for her daughter. In 2024, it distributed more than 1.4 million diapers to Central Florida families.
To get free diapers, a family’s annual income must be below 185% of the federal poverty level, or less than $57,720 for a family of four or $37,814 for a family of two.
Eligible families can receive up to 200 diapers per month for six months.
“A lot of the families that we see are essential workers. They work in hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and the pay is just not there, and they are struggling to make sure that they can keep a roof over their heads,” Lyles said.
Antonio and Ayla Edwards know that reality.
The couple live in Winter Garden with their three children. Antonio Edwards is a manager at a fast-food restaurant. Ayla Edwards receives disability income.
In the last three years, they have lived in three different houses because their landlords keep raising their rent.
“We just unpacked. I told my husband, we need to start getting rid of stuff, because every year we end up moving,” Ayla Edwards said.
Two of their three children are in diapers, which cost about $200 a month. If it were not for Ayla Edwards’ parents, who help cover that cost, she is not sure how they would keep their children in clean diapers.
“We’re one paycheck away from living in a car,” Ayla Edwards said.
Randles said WIC, the federal program that provides free food, baby formula and milk to low-income mothers and their children, should be expanded to include the other key baby supply.
“There’s no reason that the government could not do the same thing with diapers,” she said.
There are currently 417,000 Floridians receiving WIC benefits each month, according to the Florida Department of Health.
This is the third year the coalition, which oversees daycare and preschool in the county, has hosted a diaper drive.
“We were so overwhelmed by the generosity the community showed last year. We know we’re going to be able to surpass our goal of 30,000 this year,” said Kelly Schultz, the coalition’s chief of communications and community engagement.
Diaper donations can be made through the coalition’s Amazon Wishlist.
Donors can also drop off diapers in-person at the coalition’s headquarters at 7700 Southland Blvd. Suite #100 Orlando. And on Feb. 22, there will be a drive-through diaper drop off at the Dr. James R. Smith Neighborhood Center, 1723 Bruton Blvd. Orlando.