by Katie Peters

You walk past the supermarket shelves of nappies, dummies, bottles, teats and formula quite happily but somehow at around four months you find yourself glancing at the baby rice and colourful jars and tins. You are not sure if these so called “children’s foods” belong in a separate category along with turkey twizzlers but there seems to be a children’s version of most products and they are hard to avoid. Everyone else is weaning but somehow it doesn’t feel right for you and your baby?

Stop! There is another way. A fantastically instinctive and intuitive approach to weaning has been developed by UNICEF and the world heath organisation WHO

Baby led weaning basically is what it says; you do not even offer solid food until the baby shows signs of internal and external readiness (being able to sit up unaided, tongue thrust movement disappears, gut lining becomes less leaky between during the weeks between four and six months.) This generally happens somewhere around the middle of the babies first year.

At this time at normal family meal times you simply sit the baby up at the table and offer them pieces of the raw or cooked ingredients from your family meal. E.g. cucumber batons, banana chunks, cooked pasta shapes, avocado slices. Until the child’s pincer movement develops further they are unlikely to be able to pick up pieces small enough to choke on and that is pretty much it! Over the time between 6 and 12 months on a very gradual basis they will move from being exclusively breast fed to taking about half of their calories from solid food.

When you consider that almost 350g of cooked carrot contains the same amount of energy as 100g of breast milk it makes those entire big baby / small baby / weight gain arguments look pretty daft!

The key seems to me that you are not “feeding” the child - so throw away those weaning spoons. Just as a breast fed baby has learnt to regulate their food intake for the first six months and you learn to adjust to the idea that you can’t visualise how much milk they are taking this is simply a continuation of trusting your baby.

Missing out the “goo stage” means you also miss out the fiddleyness of introducing one food at a time‚ babies who were videoed for the unicef study seemed to do this naturally.

Weaning is an incredible gradual process on using this approach - A child needs the same amount of calories at 6 months, 1 year, 2 years and 3 years (as their growth rate slows) it is simply the composition of these calories that is changing.

The “iron issue” is often used to encourage mothers to wean early‚ breast milk is low is iron yes but this iron is easily and readily absorbed by the baby‚ the store built up at birth is usually starting to run low between six and twelve months‚ you can offer iron rich foods from six months but you must trust that the baby that needs them will eat them and the baby that doesn’t won’t!!

Health Visitors in the UK are only just beginning to be schooled in this new approach and it is unlikely to be rolled out until government plans to extend maternity leave are approved. (Just as the government weaning advice was changed in 2004 from four to six months when maternity leave rules were changed before.) Anecdotal evidence suggests most health visitors are ignoring this new advice anyway and still encouraging mothers to wean far to early.

Weaning does seem to be occurring later in the west – some babies born in the sixties were often solids at three weeks, ten weeks seemed popular in the seventies‚ and so on - politics of our attitudes to food aside you could view this as the logical next stage!

1) Just because your four-month-old baby is watching you eat it doesn’t mean they are ready for solids‚ they watch you do everything‚ that is just what four-month-old babies do.

2) Do not be tempted to spoon feed your baby‚ allow them to continue regulating there own food intake just as they have done already‚ a very useful skill and one that may help them avoid eating disorders in adult life.

3) You can introduce a spoon as their manual dexterity improves but it is for them to use it.

4) Present a selection of healthy foods in pieces they can manage‚ let them choose which to eat or explore with their mouths. Do not put foods in their mouths‚ this is where the choking danger comes from.

5) Babies given solids early do not sleep better‚ gram for gram in comparison to breast milk solids are very low in calories so will not “fill them up” contrary to what many people think.

6) Waiting for your baby to be ready means that preparing food is much easier (i.e. no hand blender etc needed) and food allergies are less likely.

7) Baby food manufacturers should no longer be labelling jars and packets with “16 weeks” they have been told by the government to change this to 6 months but are being rather slow to do so.

8) By twelve months a baby eating a variety of nutrious foods will be eating what its body tells it it needs and obtaining about half its daily calories from solids.

The original catalyst for these notes was a woman’s hour interview with Jenni Murray‚ featuring Annabel Karmel and Gill Rapley who conducted the MSC research into Baby led weaning.

Click here to listen to the interview

This led me to attend a fantastic seminar organised by La Leche entitled “Starting Solids” probably the best £2 of our families food budget I have ever spent!!

Chat on our starting solids forum