All About Diaper Liners

Why Do Diaper Liners Exist?

Liners exist for two reasons: to make cleanup easier when you’re tossing solids in the toilet, and to wick moisture away from baby’s skin when you’re using a natural-fabric diaper. Your primary reason for using a liner will probably determine which style you choose, because they have different features and benefits.

If you have a liner you can lift out of your diaper you can carry it to the toilet to dump the solids instead of bringing the whole diaper along. If it’s a flushable liner, you can throw the whole thing in the toilet and walk away. This is a nice option during the semi-solid poop stage when baby is still partially breastfed, to keep your diapers stain-free and to keep that hard-t0-shake-off poop out of your washer.

Fleece liners help with cleanup, but they also work like removable pocket diaper linings, to wick moisture away from baby’s skin and give us prefold users a stay-dry option. This was the main reason I looked into using them at first, but the staff person at my local shop was only aware of the cleanup benefits of liners when I asked about them, so I went away confused as to why fleece liners wouldn’t also work to keep my baby’s skin drier. They do, and I wish I had done a little more research at the time instead of giving up in my confusion. If you love your prefolds but want to keep baby’s skin drier at night, fleece liners may be for you (though they negate the benefits of using all-natural fibers against baby’s skin).

Okay, Hit Me With The Options

You know cloth diapering has too many options these days, but this is pretty simple once you know what you’re looking at:

Fleece Liners: Fleece liners are just little rectangles of fleece. They function like a pocket diaper lining to wick moisture through them away from baby’s skin, and they trap the solids for easy disposal. Then you can wash them along with your diapers, so you can reuse them hundreds of times.

Disposable Liners: Disposable liners come in tear-off rolls like toilet paper. They are made of a fibrous material that, like fleece, lets moisture through but traps solids. Disposable liners are often flushable/biodegradable, which makes cleanup even easier, but of course it will cost you more and create more trash to use these instead of reusable fleece liners, and they’re not as soft.

Where Can I Acquire Such a Nifty Product?

Diaper shops are one obvious answer to this question. Bummis makes the most popular disposable option, and there are several brands of fleece liners including Bummis and Cotton Babies (makers of BumGenius products). But you can also make your own fleece liners by simply cutting up a thin fleece receiving blanket or some similar material and using those. Fleece doesn’t fray, so you won’t even need to sew them. If you have fleece on hand this is a great way to try before you buy, but Bummis fleece liners are only $5 for a 5-pack, so it’s not much of an investment to try the fleece kind. Disposable liners run $6-10 per pack and will run you about 10-20 cents per liner, so that adds up if you use them a lot and have to keep buying more. For $20 you can get a lifetime supply of fleece liners, while disposable liners (if used at every diaper change) will run you $36 per month, or nearly $1,000 from birth to potty training. You may not use them that often, but that really adds up!

I hope that helps make diaper liners a little easier to understand. Have a great day, diapering mamas!