Baby-led Weaning

Finally got round to this. As an introduction to the topic and information on my own food background, I should mention that I have no great awareness of nutrition, healthy eating etc and that I was brought up on a meat and two veg diet with regular access to what was called the ‘chocolate cupboard’. Also, one thing that I only recently discovered was unique to my mother’s preparation of school lunches is the ‘defrosting sandwich lunch’. Mum would take a whole loaf and make cheese sandwiches. The cheese sandwiches would go back in the loaf bag, and it would be placed in the freezer. Then, in the morning, we would chip off a frozen cheese sandwich for our lunch bags. During the summer this was great as it would keep the chocolate wafer from melting. During the winter, not so great. Nobody wants a frozen cheese sandwich for lunch. 

Before having David, my only knowledge of how babies ate was from the remaining Heinz apple sauce food jars in our cellar and a vague recollection of Farley’s rusks. Having just about mastered the breast-feeding/formula combo when I finished the breast-feeding part at about three months, I was determined to be super well informed when it came to the next step. I bought handbooks, recipe books, read lots of online information and joined Facebook groups. I decided that for us, baby-led weaning (BLW) was the way to go. The NHS have a useful information page: Your baby’s first solid foods – NHS (www.nhs.uk) 

Once David hit six months and was meeting all the suggested requirements for BLW, we started feeding him small amounts of our food at dinner time. This meant that he was in charge of what he ate, how fast he ate and how much he ate. There are many different studies that say BLW can help prevent later obesity as children are more in touch with their hunger and are better able to recognise fullness and that BLW helps to make them less picky eaters as they grow up. However, there are just as many studies that say this is not true. For us, it was simply the easiest and most relaxed way of introducing David to food. I won’t lie, I was exceptionally nervous and worried that David was going to choke to death on the very first thing I fed him, but it turned out fine.  

My fear of grapes continues to this day; the knowledge that the shape of a grape could create a vacuum in a child’s throat that would make them impossible to remove in a choking situation. David is five now and I still cut them into small pieces. My health and safety (paranoia) training has clearly been passed on. If David has a whole grape from somewhere, he brings it to me and shows me that he has bitten it in two!  

I found it fascinating that as a baby, David wanted to try every different flavour and would eat lots of fruit and vegetables. I thought I was doing amazingly. However, as he has got older, his interest in vegetables has waned and it seems that the idea of BLW making children less picky eaters later has not worked for us! The best way we have found to keep him eating at least some vegetables is the ‘magical powers’ of broccoli and asparagus. Who knew that when eating a green vegetable you would be able to turn your parents into an animal of your choice! The confusion on a neighbouring restaurant table when my husband starts quacking is an easy sacrifice to ensure David has his five-a-day.