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Babyled Weaning Episode and check out more on Doulas Know Squat Podcast.
What is baby led weaning?
Baby-led weaning is a great way to introduce solid food to babies. The infant is given safe foods for their stage of development and allowed to self-feed instead of the traditional system of spoon-feeding pureed foods.
This approach is a natural continuation of responding to the baby’s hunger cues and paced bottle feeding. Parents decide what and when to feed their baby then the baby decides if they will eat and how much. People are born able to tell when they are full, and respect for this can help set them up for healthy eating patterns.
Is baby led weaning safe?
It’s natural to be concerned about babies choking when given solid foods. However, research has shown that the choking rates of infants introduced to solids using the baby-led weaning approach are comparable with those utilizing spoon-feeding with pureed foods [1]. No matter what method you take to introduce solids to your baby, taking an infant CPR class is always a good idea.
It’s also good to note that caregivers can often confuse their baby gagging for choking. They can look very similar! Babies have sensitive gag reflexes that are far forward in the mouth. Over time this gag reflex will move further back and desensitize.
Things that you can do to keep your baby safe during the process of introducing solids are:
- Always have an adult in the room and nearby while the baby eats.
- Take an infant CPR class.
- Familiarize yourself with the differences between gagging and choking.
- Prepare food that is the correct size, shape, and softness appropriate for your baby’s age and stage of development. More on this later.
When to introduce solids
The current advice by major health organizations is that babies should receive breastmilk or formula exclusively until at least six months of age, but that doesn’t mean every baby is ready for solids at the same time. Once your baby is six months old, you can look for signs of readiness. Ensuring they are developmentally ready to eat solid foods will help keep your child safe.
Signs of readiness include:
- Head and neck control.
- Sitting up independently.
- Disappearance of the tongue thrust reflex (this is where they will automatically use their tongue to push food out of their mouth)
- Ability to pick up food with their hands and bring it to their mouth.
You may notice that your baby could be as old as nine months old when they meet all these criteria. Even if they’re not ready to eat solid foods you can include them in mealtimes! Bringing them to the family table during meals can be a good habit to form early. They can be given things like large spoons to play with in their chair while the rest of the family eats. It also frees up both of your hands so you can feed yourself!
What to feed them
You may think that they best foods to start with would be tiny pieces of soft foods, but actually the best place to start would be the opposite. I recommend starting with large hard foods that the baby isn’t able to bite yet. These are going to be foods large enough that they can grab it in their fist and bring it to their mouth to chew on without any risk of them actually swallowing it.
The benefits of starting out with these types of foods are allowing them to explore taste and texture, practice moving the food around in their mouth with their tongue, and start strengthening the jaw for chewing. Then if they start to gag, it is much easier for them to pull the food back out of their mouth with their tiny hands rather than utilizing immature muscle movements of the tongue to push it out of the way.
Some good examples of these starter foods would be:
- A whole peeled apple
- Frozen banana
- Large whole uncooked carrot
- Celery sticks
- Tough meat cut into strips
If it looks like they are developing enough jaw strength to break off a bite of one of these foods, you would want to take it away and reintroduce it later. Your next group of foods to introduce will be those softer foods that will readily mush in the mouth, such as avocado or banana. Again you would want these pieces to be large enough that they can grab it with their fist and take a bite out of the end. You want to force them to take bites and be unable to stuff the whole object into their mouth to swallow without chewing.
Once they have developed the habit of chewing and a pincher grasp where they can use their thumb and forefinger to pick up objects, you could introduce the smaller foods and cut up pieces.
Remember that small round foods must be cut into quarters for babies and toddlers. Some foods that can be choking hazards if not cut include:
- Hot dogs (cut lengthwise, not into slices)
- Grapes
- Berries
- Melon Balls
- Cherries
Cups
The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages the introduction of liquids from a cup starting at six months of age. This can include introducing small amounts of water, but juice should be avoided or limited.
To introduce drinking from an open faced cup, you can start with mixing apple sauce or full-fat yogurt with some breastmilk or formula, creating a consistency that will flow in the cup, but slow enough for baby to control the rate of flow more easily and start with only very small amounts.
There are many concerns around using sippy cups and how they promote poor tongue posture. Many feeding specialists prefer the use of open faced cups or straws. You can read more about the reasoning here.
Allergy considerations
Current research suggests that introducing allergenic foods to your baby early and often could reduce their risk of developing allergies. You can read more about it here.
The 9 most common allergenic foods are:
- Milk.
- Eggs.
- Fish
- Shellfish
- Tree nuts
- Peanuts.
- Wheat.
- Soybeans.
- Sesame
Food before one just for fun?
This saying goes around a lot and is not 100% true. While you don’t have to be concerned about your baby consuming large volumes of food each day before they are one year old, it is important that they start to get some solid food intake by about the nine month mark, especially for breastfed babies.
The primary concern here is iron. Breastmilk is not an adequate source of iron for older babies. So, iron-deficient anemia can become a concern if we don’t get some additional iron into their diet during this first year.
What about the mess?
Raising babies is messy and so can be baby led weaning. There are no tools that you have to use for baby led weaning. This is one of the huge advantages to the approach. However, many parents are concerned about the mess it can create. Some ways to mitigate the mess are:
- Utilize long sleeved bibs
- Strip baby down to a diaper for meal times
- Laying a tarp or plastic on the floor under where the baby will be eating
- Purchase an attachment for your high chair that goes under your baby’s feet to catch dropping.
- Only provide small amounts of food at a time, supplying more as they finish what they have. A baby who is no longer interested in eating may start to throw the food onto the ground. Less food is wasted if only a small amount is available to them.
- *Bonus tip* Dogs in the home love eating the dropped food from self-fed infants.
Further reading
Websites
Reducing allergy risk: https://www.babysfirst.org/
Recipes: https://www.superhealthykids.com/
Books
First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee WIlson
Baby-Led Weaning: The Essential Guide by Gill Rapley, Ph.D. and Tracey Murkett
Your Baby Can Self-Feed, Too: Adapted Baby-Led Weaning for Children with Developmental Delays or Other Feeding Challenges by Jill Rabin, MS, Gill Rapley, Ph.D.
Articles
Peanut Allergy Prevention Clinical Trial Summary
Research
- Brown A. No difference in self-reported frequency of choking between infants introduced to solid foods using a baby-led weaning or traditional spoon-feeding approach. J Hum Nutr Diet. 2018 Aug;31(4):496-504. doi: 10.1111/jhn.12528. Epub 2017 Dec 5. PMID: 29205569.
- Shim JE, Kim J, Mathai RA; STRONG Kids Research Team. Associations of infant feeding practices and picky eating behaviors of preschool children. J Am Diet Assoc. 2011 Sep;111(9):1363-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jada.2011.06.410. PMID: 21872699.
- Coulthard H, Harris G, Emmett P. Delayed introduction of lumpy foods to children during the complementary feeding period affects child’s food acceptance and feeding at 7 years of age. Matern Child Nutr. 2009 Jan;5(1):75-85. doi: 10.1111/j.1740-8709.2008.00153.x. PMID: 19161546; PMCID: PMC6860515.
- Webber C, Blissett J, Addessi E, Galloway AT, Shapiro L, Farrow C. An infant-led approach to complementary feeding is positively associated with language development. Matern Child Nutr. 2021 Oct;17(4):e13206. doi: 10.1111/mcn.13206. Epub 2021 May 25. PMID: 34031998; PMCID: PMC8476407.
