From helping your child to learn their food intake to refining their motor skills, baby-led weaning has great benefits. Of course, this means forgetting purees and spoons and simply letting your baby feed themselves.
The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding until six months. By this time, your bub should be sitting up straight and have good neck and shoulder control.
Start by offering mashed easy-to-digest fruit and vegetables, such as pumpkin, potato, sweet potato, banana and cooked pears and apples. Here are the best tips for feeding babies safely with nourishing and delicious foods.
In the very early days of first foods, it’s unlikely your baby will manage to eat much at all. Your bub’s feeding skills will need time to develop and their nutritional needs will mostly be met by breast milk. In time, they will start to eat more, but remember that making a mess is all part of the learning experience.
Unless a baby has a diagnosed sensitivity to a food, there is very little restriction in what you can offer them. The most important thing to be mindful of is choking and ensuring that foods offered are age-appropriate.
So, hard foods such as raw carrots, apples or very small foods such as whole nuts that can get lodged in the throat should not be given. Babies under one year should also not be offered honey in any form because of the risk of botulism.
Text: Fiona Wright/Now To Love