Back when I was pregnant, I didn’t really think too much about feeding our baby actual food. And even in the first few months, my focus was so completely on breastfeeding that any thoughts of solids were pushed to the realm of “I have plenty of time to figure that out.” I wanted to investigate the real food movement and shape up our own diet before worrying about Miriam’s. And then at our four month appointment, the pediatrician brought up starting solids. Suddenly I went from prancing along without a care in the world, thinking I really had this new mom thing down pat, to frantically checking out library books and scouring the internet to figure out how the heck I was going to feed my child!
Luckily, I quickly realized there was no need to panic. At the beginning at least, starting solids is more about learning to eat than actually getting nourishment – she would still be growing primarily on breastmilk. With a sigh of relief, I unwound and set about perusing some literature (thanks for your recommendations!) to figure out some general guidelines for our baby’s first foods. I was already planning to wait to start until 6 months and to make our own baby food once we did. I couldn’t see any health value in commercial baby cereals (although I could certainly see the convenience value!), so I wanted to find a resource that told me what healthy foods to feed when.
I started with Super Baby Food and Real Food for Mother and Baby. These two books were very different from each other in many ways! Where Super Baby Food gave detailed instructions for pureeing and spoonfeeding, Real Food gave loose guidelines to let your baby just feed herself. Where Super Baby Food strongly encouraged a vegetarian diet based on whole grains, Real Food extolled pork chops bones and scorned early grains. Where Super Baby Food was far too concerned about germs and safety, Real Food was a bit cavalier about it.
Nonetheless, I was starting to come up with some vague ideas for how we would go about this. And then I got my hands on Baby-Led Weaning. And I was hooked.
The idea behind baby-led weaning (BLW) is that children are primed to feed themselves starting at about 6 months of age. (“Weaning” in this instance is the more British understanding of the term, referring more to the starting of solids than to the cessation of nursing, although it’s all really one long continuum.) Once babies can sit up and don’t immediately spit things out of their mouths, they can and should start exploring the world of food. They will more play with the food than eat it to start, but they will begin to eat with more purpose when they need to. They join the family at mealtime and learn a great deal by imitation.
There is no specific order of foods. There are no rules regarding the amount of time between introducing new foods. There is no pureeing or spoon-feeding. The baby is simply offered a variety of healthy foods (not too much, not too little, often what the rest of the family is eating) and they determine what and how much they will eat.
This just sounds like an easier way to go about feeding our baby – although maybe I really am just lazy! Of the benefits that the authors list, the ones that really stand out to me are that BLW is such a good learning experience, that the baby is involved in the family meal, and that the baby can learn appetite control and a positive attitude towards food (ie, less likelihood of obesity or eating disorders). Supposedly this also leads to fewer mealtime battles and less pickiness as a toddler, which I would welcome – I’ve been dreading the pickiness, as I was quite picky for quite a long time myself!
The authors do acknowledge two downsides to BLW – it’s messy and people worry.
Isn't this dangerous?
Choking and allergies and malnourishment, oh my!
Choking is the one thing I was worried about. This book does include a whole section on it and on mouth development – how the gag reflex starts out fronter on the tongue and moves back, and how babies learn from that. BLW also encourages serving large pieces that babies can hold and gnaw on, as opposed to tiny pieces that can get stuck. After reading about it, most of my fears were allayed. But just to err on the side of caution, I am planning to take an infant CPR class!
I’m not worried about allergies. As far as I can see, there’s no consensus on whether starting common allergens early or late will lead to a reduction of allergies. Since we don’t have any family history of allergies, I feel fine not waiting a week between new foods and introducing more than one food at once.
I’m not worried about getting the right nutrients. We eat pretty healthy and as I delve into the real food movement more and more, we’re eating healthier and healthier – so Miriam should be fine with the foods on our table.
The one issue I had with this book was that it didn’t really cite any research to back its claims up. BLW goes against a lot of conventional wisdom, so it would be nice to have some studies supporting it (though I’m not sure how truly well-founded most of our conventional “wisdom” actually is at this point!). But apparently BLW such a new concept (at least in the West) that researchers are just now looking into it. A Google Scholar search turned up only a few studies. I was happy to find that the January 2011 issue of Maternal and Child Nutrition was available free online so I could read through the couple articles out there on the topic. But these were basically descriptive studies that confirmed that yes, BLW is possible and it occurs. I also found one other study (here), which found a correlation between BLW and a “lower control maternal feeding style,” which could be positively impact child weight and eating style. Because I personally think that the arguments for BLW make sense, I look forward to better scientific validation of them in the future.
So what’s the actual plan?
A few weeks ago I thought I would be writing out a detailed list of what foods we were going to eat when. But nope. We’re going to wait ‘til she’s 6 months – but probably not a day longer! I probably will still start by giving her foods like avocado, banana, and sweet potatoes, but in chunks and sticks instead of pureeed. Then we’ll start just taking (healthy) foods off our plates and putting them on her tray and letting her go to town! We won’t worry about how much she’s actually ingesting until she’s more like 8-9 months at the earliest. And eventually she will transition from mostly breastmilk to mostly solids. And then all solids, at which point I will likely be a blubbering mess unless there’s another on the way.
Have any of you done baby-led weaning? How'd it go? And I would love to hear any anecdotes about starting finger foods, whether you started with those or purees!