Discovering diaper play, with help from Dr. Spock

[nonny]

Did anyone else like to secretly read the toilet training chapters of your parents’ baby care books as a kid? And/or the parts about accidents, and bedwetting, and diapers....?

Did you ever look up words related to wetting and diapers in the dictionary, and the library catalogue? 

Find all the diaper-related ads in catalogues, grocery store flyers and magazines? Walk down the diaper aisle at the store at every opportunity? Remember every single mention of someone being desperate, or needing their diaper changed, or ‘having an accident’ in every story you ever read and every conversation you heard?

What else did you do like this?

Here's how some of it started for me. About 5 seconds into puberty I accidentally gave myself some very good feelings wriggling around trying to hold it in when I was desperate to pee. I didn’t have an accident or anything, but suddenly I was really aroused by imagining having one. Holding until I couldn’t, and helplessly wetting my pants or bed like I often had as a younger kid. Memories came ‘flooding back,’ and with them a sudden bunch of questions I’d never thought about before.

How old was I when I was potty trained? What was it like for my parents when I was not-quite-potty-trained? Did I really just have accidents everywhere for a while? What must it feel like to be in diapers?

Being nerdy and bookish and genuinely curious, I found my parents’ copy of Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care. Along with learning a few basic facts about my diaper years, I quickly discovered that reading about all this gave me lots of tingly feelings and urges about doing it. Some of my earliest pee play consisted of wearing makeshift diapers (or just my pyjamas or pants), making myself desperate and literally wetting myself like a baby to the words and sentences in that book that made me feel that way. 

Not long afterwards, I was doing the same to ads for Pampers and plastic baby pants in my parents’ magazines. I kind of discovered ageplay this way, imagining being the babies in the ads as I really did what babies do in their diapers. Or I’d be a 2 or 3 or 4 year old in the Dr. Spock chapter, failing potty training in my diapers or pants in any of a hundred ways… Forgetting to go and doing it where I sat... Not being able to hold it any more in a car or a store... Hurrying to the bathroom clutching myself a minute too late, and feeling it running all down my pantlegs on the way.

Which all felt so freeing, exciting and good that I still have favourite sentences from that chapter and some of those ads memorized.

[ppdude]

Wow, you really packed a lot in there! No, I don't think my parents had a manual, and neither did I. Being a completely unqualified and no nothing therapist with no medical training, I think I was potty trained too early. Parents started training me when my brother was born and probably around 20-22 months old. No clue really, just an opinion.

Always had a fascination with diapers but really liked the rubber (PVC) panties since I can remember. Loved to go through the diaper aisles and wished I could buy them and fave them fit. Did buy rubber pants when I was a teen and money to spend. Always looked at the diaper ads in the magazines and catalogs. They made me feel and act squirrelly while looking at them and dreaming about how good they would fee. I haven't fought the feelings for a long time and have immersed myself in it with no regrets.

[AbabeBill]

I too, loved to go through anything that had to do with diapers, especially plastic baby pants. Ads, catalogs, books, Sears, Wards, J C Penny. And, I did not miss an opportunity to go down the baby isle at the store. The super market, always had all the Gerber baby pants, hung overhead on pegs. Still can remember, being in the shopping cart seat, and gazing up at the pull-on, and snap-on plastic panties. When in Woolworth, I would break from my mom, and head down the baby isle. I felt so ashamed, and scared looking at all the different plastic pants there. I can remember the, WOW factor, seeing the frilly plastic panties ment for girls, and the ones with prints, even the multiple color pants. 

Sometimes, I worked up the courage to feel some of them. I thought how funny, the plastic covered training pants looked too. Thick terry cloth underpants, with plastic covers! Oh yeah! LOL! 

[ppdude]

1 hour ago, AbabeBill said:

I too, loved to go through anything that had to do with diapers, especially plastic baby pants. Ads, catalogs, books, Sears, Wards, J C Penny. And, I did not miss an opportunity to go down the baby isle at the store. The super market, always had all the Gerber baby pants, hung overhead on pegs. Still can remember, being in the shopping cart seat, and gazing up at the pull-on, and snap-on plastic panties. When in Woolworth, I would break from my mom, and head down the baby isle. I felt so ashamed, and scared looking at all the different plastic pants there. I can remember the, WOW factor, seeing the frilly plastic panties ment for girls, and the ones with prints, even the multiple color pants. 

Sometimes, I worked up the courage to feel some of them. I thought how funny, the plastic covered training pants looked too. Thick terry cloth underpants, with plastic covers! Oh yeah! LOL! 

Yes! When I got enough money as a young teen, I walked to Woolworth's downtown (a long walk). Had to be careful looking at the Patta-Cake with baby poweder as it was a small town and grandma worked there. Once I ascertained her absence, and had no idea who the register clerk was, I was "safe". Went to the aisle where the plastic pants were kept and pulled out a pair of XL out of the bin, looked at the price and thought "YES!". I was hot and bothered and found it difficult to get to the checkout. The gal at the checkout smiled as she rang me up and paid for my very first pair! Couldn't wait to go to bed that night and it was a night of such pleasure that I will not forget. Ah, youth! No going back after that. Better than sex I thought even though I had no idea what "having sex" meant". Nuff said.

[Angela Bauer]

I remember when I was starting to read finding a copy of Dr. Spock's first edition in hard cover on a book shelf at my grandparents. Later that day I asked my Mom, "Who is Dr. Spock?" by way of an answer Mom handed me a well-worn paperback copy of the 1958 edition, which she bought while pregnant with my older sister Penny. By then all three of my younger siblings had been born. My younger brother Ed took forever to toilet train. I still needed 'just-in-case' diapers for trips and special events.

Mom said I should read Dr. Spock since he was famous. I started with his chapters on diapers and toilet training. Mom mentioned that his advice had changed over the years, so I took the newer paperback next door to Granny's to compare. When I told her what I was doing, Granny opened her edition to a bookmark. That was the section about discipline, punishment and spanking.

Granny never let an opportunity pass when she could proclaim her belief spanking was essential to responsible parenting. My parents then were absolutely anti-punishment, especially spanking. Comparing editions I found that Dr. S was not so anti-spanking in 1958 while hardly saying spanking was the best punishment. After reading those chapters I ignored his diaper advice.

When I could go to the library I read all available editions of Dr. S. Granny bought me a paperback of the them latest edition in 1972. By then at least once a month Granny told me all I needed was a good old-fashioned spanking. In front of me Granny told by older sister, Penny, who was 13 at the time, more than twice a week that she needed spanking very badly. Dr. S felt 13 was far too old to be spanked.

Years later, after I fell in love with and married Don Davis he told me his father was dean of surgery at Columbia Med School when Ben Spock was hired to teach pediatrics. Don told me his dad said that Dr. Spock's wife almost bragged about how often and hard she spanked their children. Granny loved it when I told her about Mrs. Spock!

[ppdude]

22 minutes ago, Angela Bauer said:

Years later, after I fell in love with and married Don Davis he told me his father was dean of surgery at Columbia Med School when Ben Spock was hired to teach pediatrics. Don told me his dad said that Dr. Spock's wife almost bragged about how often and hard she spanked their children. Granny loved it when I told her about Mrs. Spock!

isn't it funny how people rarely practice  what they preach?

[nonny]

I learned how to fold diapers from Dr. Spock. And how long I’d probably worn them, and how often my mom had needed to change mine. I hadn’t known any of this until then.

There was something magically “right” and unreasonably exciting about knowing the comforting, childish bulge of a makeshift diaper in my pants was folded just like the ones I needed as a baby. It was even better when I happened on an old pair of diaper pins that had almost certainly held my sisters’ and my diapers on us many times.

What I really wanted to know was what it had felt like to use them. To wet like a baby, and be wet, like all the real babies who were dressed the same way right now. I pictured all the places I would have done it — my bed, my high chair, my mother’s lap, anywhere. Dr. Spock told me I probably wasn’t bothered by being wet, unless I leaked and got cold. Could that really be true? I had no memories of my diaper years, or toilet training (right around age 2) but it had sure left me with the certainty that being wet was dirty, shameful and gross. (The other thing I had needed my diapers for was too much to imagine at this point.) 

I was also reading Pampers ads in magazines that tried to make cloth diapers seem primitive and uncomfortable. “Of course when you were a baby they didn’t have diapers like Pampers. So when you wet, you stayed wet, until somebody changed you.” “A drier baby’s more comfortable.” So why did I want to be a wet baby, in bulky cloth diapers, so much?

Or a little boy in wet pants?

(My parents started out as very occasional spankers and moved in the direction of never. I think they regretted that they’d ever done it. But we were of prime spanking age in the late 60s and a lot of things had changed.)