Baby-led weaning is the practice of trusting your baby’s innate sense of hunger, of want, of self-knowledge and of self-limitation. Baby-led weaning offers parents and their children a natural, relaxed approach to the introduction of solid foods and the eventual cessation of breastfeeding. Instead of relying on prepared, commercial baby foods or even homemade purees, mothers and fathers simply introduce their babies to natural, wholesome real food from the start – relying on their babies to self-regulate and lead the way. In her book Real Food for Mother & Baby which is available online (see sources), author Nina Planck discusses her experiences with the baby-led approach to solids at length.
Baby-led Weaning: Our Family’s Experience
At six and a half months, my exclusively breastfed son seemed to take an interest in food and exhibited other signs of readiness. So, like any dutifully crunchy mother holding true to her naturalistic ideals, I began preparing mashes and purees like a madwoman. I mashed avocadoes and bananas into a slick, lumpy green goop. I blended roast butternut squash and spooned it neatly into ice cube trays – two tablespoons, a perfect serving! I pureed blueberries until they’d stain your skin a vibrant purple if you just looked at them the wrong way. When it came time to feeding my son, we’d stretch out a blanket or sheet on the floor, sit him in its center and start spoon-feeding him from the little pots of colorful slop I’d so dutifully prepared.
It was a disaster.
He’d laugh and giggle as I spooned blueberry puree into his mouth, sending bits of purple flying. He’d dig his hands into the butternut squash and paint his torso a vivid orange. And, occasionally, he’d grimace or gag as I’d plop mashed avocado into his mouth with a spoon. Within a few days, spoon-feeding my baby boy became a power struggle (have I explained to you how extraordinarily obstinate my child is, and was for the get-go?); he wanted to do it himself, dammit. And why shouldn’t he? After all, I certainly wouldn’t appreciate someone spooning strange goopy mashes into my mouth.
It was about this time that I stumbled across the concept of baby-led weaning, an approach to solid foods that simply made sense. Rather than my spoon-feeding our son, we’d simply follow his own interests and cues and allow him to feed himself real food from the start. No more purees. No more mashes. No more bits of blueberry shooting like little purple missiles from a grimacing mouth. (Learn more about how I’ve nourished my child.)
A baby-led approach starts at the breast.
Baby-lead weaning is a natural approach to solid foods and to feeding your baby in general, and it starts at the breast. When you breastfeed your child, you rely on your baby to let you know when he or she is hungry and you allow your baby to self-regulate his or her eating patterns – feeding your baby on demand. This level of innate parent-child connection and your trust in your baby’s ability to self-regulate based on his or her own hunger is the essence and foundation of baby-led weaning.
Feeding by bottle presents challenges to the baby-led approach, which is not to say it cannot be a nurturing method of feeding your baby or that baby-led weaning will not be successful for mothers who must bottle feed their babies for whatever reason. Bottles drip into the mouths of babies making it difficult for babies to self-regulate intake (a critical aspect of the baby-led approach). Researchers into baby-led weaning strongly encourage breastfeeding as the foundation for this unique, natural approach to the introduction of solid foods.
Signs of Readiness
In many cases, parents introduce solid foods to their babies far too early – with some parents feeding industrially processed rice cereal as early as four weeks. Others rely on stated dates and ages for the introduction of solid foods – thinking they must start solids at six months, no earlier and no later.
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Read the rest of Baby-led Weaning: A Real Food Approach to Feeding Your Baby (810 words)
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