Thoughts from those who weaned early...

[sophiechristophy]

Hi Sally,

On the choking issue - blw is actually a really good way to help protect your child from choking. When we are born, our gag reflex is closer to the front of the mouth, and as a baby grows, it moves back towards the back of the mouth. When you offer foods in BWL, your baby gets to understand about his gag reflex while it is still closer to the front of his mouth (ie further from his windpipe). He also learns how to move food in his mouth safely, as he is manipulating larger pieces rather than supping liquids. He will gag in the early weeks. This is totally normal, and does not mean he will choke - he is just testing our his gag reflex. Choking and gagging are not the same thing. Choking is when the wind pipe is blocked, and is silent, where as gagging is our bodies way of helping us to avoid choking.

The key things to watch regarding what foods to introduce are salt, whole nuts (children under 5 shouldn't be given whole nuts as they present a choking risk), whole grapes, things with pits like whole olives and cherries. Aside from that, if you are eating a healthy diet yourself, you can offer him pretty much what you eat. There is no reason to limit this to fruits and vegetables - protein and essential fats (like those in olive oil and avocado and oily fish) are really important for growing babies. A lamb chop bone with some of the meat left on is a great thing to offer (just remove any gristle). Although there isn't a major problem with it, I would personally only occasionally offer foods that aren't nutrient dense, such as bread and other wheat products, rice cakes, crackers, breadsticks, pasta, rice etc. This is because they don't really offer your baby anything great nutritionally, and so seem a bit pointless to me when meat/fish/vegetables/fruit are a more nourishing alternative.

In the early weeks (or even months) he probably won't eat all that much. This is ok because he will still be getting what he needs from his milk feeds, which should continue as usual (are you breast or bottle feeding?). Over the months to come, he will gradually eat more and more, although expect this to fluctuate and will be affected by things like teething, colds, hot weather etc (things that affect our appetites too, well, apart from the teething!). This is totally ok - the idea is that through BLW your baby is given the opportunity to respond to his own hunger cues, will eat when he is hungry, and will not when he is not. It is really important to allow this, as overriding a baby/childs natural hunger cues can cause longer term issues with them being able to know when they are full. This can then have implications for overeating.

Sophie x

[sophiechristophy]

Sorry - should also have mentioned to avoid sugar. x

[Sally81]

Thanks Sophie...I just watched the little vid from the link that Ruth posted too. All really helpful. I'm quite excited about trying now...it does seem to make a lot of sense and seems much more fun than spooning in mashed stuff that all seems the same! I'll see how we go over the next few days and if it's okay will possibly pm you if I come up against anything I'm not sure about or just for general tips.

Thanks very much everyone for taking the time to advise!

Happy eating.....hopefully.

[Yak]

Can I further hijack this thread? BLW experts, is it possible to combine BLW with more traditional weaning? For instance, could you give baby rice alongside chunks of pear / sweet potato? Or would this just confuse them even more? I really like the idea of BLW but am also keen to try out baby rice etc when the time comes (which is not for ages, thankfully!)

Cheers.

[Belle]

Yak - def! we did a bit of spoon fed rusks in milk, and yoghurt, but also did things like mini oatibix in milk so my son could pick them up with his hands if he wanted to. I think a lot of people end up doing a mixture of both - I was never v purist about it and it worked out fine.

[Saffron]

Hi Yak,

Mixing traditional spoon feeding with offering lots of finger foods is not, strictly speaking, baby-led weaning. When people say they did a mix of BLW and traditional weaning, what they usually mean is that they did spoon feeding and also offered lots of finger foods.

Offering babies finger foods is very good for them, whether in the context of BLW, or as part of spoon-fed weaning. In other words, it won't confuse a spoon-fed baby to offer him/her finger foods. Under 1 yo, food is more for fun than any thing, and most babies love to play with their food!

The main thing about weaning is that it should be fun for parent and baby.

[Moos]

Thirded - or is it fourthed? We spoonfeed but Twosling has finger foods every day - chunks of pear at breakfast, "soldiers" of cold chicken at lunch, bits of toast at supper, for e.g. Didn't give him any toast (wheat) till he was over 7 months though.

[helena handbasket]

Good point Saffron. I had never even heard of BLW when my son was a baby (kind of glad actually) and we just experimented with everything. I made a lot of my son's food and loved it because I came up with an easy way to get loads of nutrient rich stuff into him while still controlling the texture. I thickened with grains, potato, mushy rice, quinoa, oats or whatever. The thicker mashes he ate with his hands but he also loved to use his little spoon to feed himself sometimes. If I added herbs (especially dill)or butter and later cheese it changed the meals enough to give variety. Mashed carrots with extra chunk left in them were popular. My biggest goal was to get him used to lots of flavour and texture early to avoid battles later. He was a fantastic eater .......until he turned two! My effort was about an hour in the kitchen twice a week so really painless.

Every meal had a bowl/spoon component and finger foods. Watermelon is a good one as it just dissolves in your mouth. A personal favourite was frozen mixed vegetables (the peas and carrots one) that I steamed and kept in the fridge ready for meals. I just put those on his tray. Mushy pears and fruits are great too. Having yoghurt for him to dip things into was a big one (especially pancakes cut into fingers), even plain greek style was okay with him (back then, not anymore!).

It could be completely wrong, but I seem to remember someone once telling me to judge what to feed by the teeth the baby had. Biologically speaking they are not really meant to eat chewable food until the teeth for that come in, if that makes any sense? I know personally I would draw the line at meat but that is just my instincts and not science.

I think it would have been so much easier to parent ten years ago, when it was just called "feeding" "sleeping" etc.. My friends who have teenagers always laughed at me when I brought up the terms we use now, which helped me get a bit of perspective.

[sophiechristophy]

hi Yak,

There are a couple of things to think about with this. My first question would what your reasoning was in wanting to introduce foods like baby rice? Baby rice is a highly processed food, lacking in nutrients, made from white rice and white flour, lacking in flavour texture and nutrients. I don't think it constitutes a good food for babies.

If you do want to give your baby something that is best carried by a spoon, my advice is to make that food thick enough that it can be loaded onto a spoon, and the spoon given to the baby.

The second thing to think about is the psychology behind the one of the benefits of BLW, which is about establishing the dynamic in your family regarding eating. This is to do with thinking about the psychological impact of spoon feeding. Spoon feeding comes along with overt expectation. By presenting a spoon to your child, you are saying to them that you expect them to open their mouth, eat what is on it, and then prepare to be fed again. If the baby doesn't immediately do this, you have a situation - do you verbally encourage them to eat it? Try to entice them? Just give up? Most likely, some tension will arise. Your baby may then accept the food, not because they are hungry or because they enjoy the food, but because you have persuaded them to eat it. This is overriding the babies natural ability to manage their own appetite. Alternatively, they may refuse the food all together, and this will probably be frustrating to you and worrying, as you will become concerned that they aren't eating enough. BLW avoids these situations. Ideally, you offer foods to your baby by putting them a few a at a time into the tray of their chair, and leaving them to it, just getting on with eating your own food. This totally diffuses the situation, and makes eating an enjoyable thing. Your baby is in control of what they eat and how much. I find that it is often the case, at a family meal time, that a baby will explore their food the most when others at the table are distracted by their own conversations and meals. This is pretty natural behaviour - how many of us like to be stared at while we are eating?

Sophie x

[helena handbasket]

"The psychological impact of spoon feeding"? Try reading that out loud without laughing.

Are we getting just a tad carried away with these notions?

Sorry Sophie, didn't mean you're getting carried away. I mean us as a collective of mothers hell bent on driving ourselves insane.;-)

[sophiechristophy]

Hi Helena,

To understand something of what I mean, you can do a simple experiment. Get someone to spoon feed you something, without knowing in advance what that food will be. I expect that you will feel apprehension, nervousness, some resistance to accepting that spoon. Putting things into our mouths is an intimate act. It is natural that we would be apprehensive to it, this is a survival instinct.

Spoon feeding also turns what should be instinctive eating to nourish ourselves, into a control issue. It can be the case for the control aspect to have implications for children as they grow up, in regards to their acceptance of foods and the relationship between the person feeding the child and their willingness to eat.

These are my opinions, based on my experiences working with families with young children as a community cookery teacher.

[helena handbasket]

It only becomes a control issue if you make it one. I spoon fed when my son liked it, stopped if he didn't. He was welcome to take the spoon himself or eat the finger foods off of his tray. It was all up to him and no control.

To be honest, it seems more controlling to just not provide it at all and decide to not let them experiment a bit with all kinds of feeding. We had a great time with all of our feeding experiments because I just let it flow, and personally that feels much more like BLW than making all of these decisions and declarations for the baby. We had a lovely time in that six-seven months learning period.

For the record, I actually do have a degree in Developmental Psychology so I have some background in this. There are probably as many opinions as there are types of babies and mums out there, which tells you a bit about reliability. I'm not against BLW at all, but babies are not any more anxious about their mother feeding them with a spoon than they are any number of other new things they are learning. That is a learned response.

[sophiechristophy]

Helena I think you may have misunderstood my post.

[Fuschia]

I think our attitudes to feeding our children show a lot about ourselves ...

[helena handbasket]

Sophie-that's entirely possible

Fuschia- I think you're right, but would add that that's probably true for most of our parenting choices. I know I followed all of the guidelines exactly as outlined because I'm a bit of an anxious rule follower and listen more to research than opinion. But the "safe rebel" side of me had fun with playing around within the guidelines. That could totally be the story of my life!

[helena handbasket]

I should add that I think it was the crippling formula guilt I had that made planning and making my son's food such a great experience for me. I hate hate hated that I couldn't control his earliest food and so making him amazing food once he was on solids was my way of taking back that role of provider. I loved everything about it and felt more like a "real" mother at that point (the BF issues took a real toll on my mental health for a while which is why I used the term "real", it's how I felt).

So that is part of the puzzle as well.

[supergolden88]

Genuine question for those of you who are doing BLW. Do any of you work? I can't somehow picture a nursery or childminder going along with BLW. A good nanny maybe.

My son is currently being very difficult about spoon feeding very possibly due to teething. He is happily trying finger foods offered but has a very sensitive gag reflex and only recently managed to keep anything chunky down.

[crystal7]

That's a good point SG88. My daughter started off on a mix of purees and finger food but soon rejected feeding. I returned to work when she was 11 months old and left her with a childminder. By then though she was able to eat chopped up food with her fingers such as spaghetti bolognaise and they had sandwiches, crudites etc for lunch a lot anyway. I'm not sure how it would have worked had she been there for the start of BLW. Childminder is excellent but it's messy and would have been time consuming if the other children in her care were being spoonfed.

Going back to Yak's question, I mixed the 2 approaches from 6 months with no problem at all and as I said above E wasn't keen on spoonfeeding anyway (apart from youghurt!). ALthough never bothered with baby rice, went straight to fruit/veg.

[sophiechristophy]

I guess I would say that it depends on the age at which you are leaving your child with a nursery/childminder? If your child will be 12 months or so, they will probably have developed good independent self feeding skills, and plus by that age they will as crystal said most likely be eating food that can be easily eaten on their own, and spoon feeding won't be necessary anyway.

If you are leaving them from 6 months, I guess that entirely depends on your child-minder's own approach, they might be into BLW and already doing it in their house (actually quite likely if they have had a number of children themselves as it ends up being a lot easier than spoon feeding).

[Yak]

Thanks everyone for the really helpful comments. To summarise, it seems to me that BLW isn't just the same as offering finger foods - I had assumed they were one and the same thing. Sophiechristophy - I've no particular reason for mentioning baby rice - it's just what I saw another mum offer as a first try for solids. And the more I think about it, iInstinctively I've a slight aversion to things with "baby" in the title as I very cynically suspect its more marketing than substance.I like the idea of oatibix dipped in milk, yoghurts, etc.

I will be going back to work FT when the Yaklet is 8 months old and Mr Yak is becoming a stay at home dad for 3 - 6 months before we use a nursery / childminder. So another factor I'll have to add into the mix is Mr Yak's faff tolerance threshold, so we may end up BLW as much as accident as by design!