What To Feed Your Child During Baby-led Weaning
Here are the best tips for feeding babies safely with nourishing, delicious and easy-to-digest foods
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.
There is an early window from around the six-to-12-month mark when babies are open to exploring new tastes and textures, and by introducing real, whole, recognisable food from the get-go we are making the most of that important time. Finally, allowing babies to set their own pace at mealtimes enables them to retain control of what and how much they want to eat.
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.
Good starter foods are those that are long, thin and relatively soft, and are often called finger foods. These textures enable a baby to easily hold one half and put the other half in their mouth. Even without teeth, most babies can effectively munch soft foods with their hard gums from around six months old.
Ideas include soft pieces such as banana, orange segments (no pips), and very ripe peach or pear. You can also consider cooked vegetables such as carrot or zucchini, slow-cooked strips of meat or poultry, strips of omelette or toast 'soldiers'.
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