A couple of weeks ago, on my post about baby food and the culture of fear, Marianne left a little comment about “baby-led weaning.” (Don’t you love Marianne’s comments? Her perspective as a teacher is awesome!) She suggested I google the term, so I did.
And I was enlightened!
After doing a lot of skimming on the subject, I’ve gleaned that baby-led weaning (or, baby-led solids) is an alternative way of getting your baby to eat solids by bypassing the spoonfed purees and soupy cereals stage. Instead, from as early as baby is able to hold up his (or her, but I’ll stick to the male gender because it’s all I know!) head and grasp something the shape and size of your finger, you provide baby with an array of finger foods and let him pick and choose whatever he wants.
The theory says that baby will first lick and then start to chew on and eat food when he’s biologically ready to do so. The benefit is that baby will learn to listen to his own hunger cues and regulate his intake accordingly. Babies are also (they say) less likely to become fussy because they are exposed to a wide variety of textures and flavours right from the beginning. And finally, they profess that baby will be happier eating at the same time as and the same food as the rest of the family.
I’m skeptical of the latter points above, but have nonetheless embraced a baby-led weaning for most of Lucas’s meals. In fact, I’d been leaning toward this anyway, without being aware of the theory. (Kind of how I stumbled into attachment parenting, too.) I posted before about how happy I was the day that Lucas was able to cram his own Cheerios into his gob, if only for the liberation it allowed me. Now, I find that the ideas encapsulated by baby-led weaning mesh rather nicely with my own new eating habits and ideals. I think a lot of this is strongly influenced, too, by the fact that as a family we are eating much more healthily that we were back when Tristan and Simon were babies. Baby-led weaning liberates me to eat my dinner while it’s relatively warm AND saves me preparing a completely separate meal for him. In other words, it’s better for me, and it’s ALWAYS about what’s best for me, right?
The result is that Lucas’s introduction to the world of solids has been considerably different than that of his brothers. For one, I waited a little longer. (Tristan and Simon were both on baby cereal at four months.) Second, I’m offering him foods that I would never have thought a baby of not-quite eight months old can eat — cucumber spears, potato chunks, kidney beans, raw apple slices, broccoli and cauliflower florets, diced ham and chicken and steak, even bits of spinach. And he eats it all, with gusto. There’s nothing that I’ve offered him so far that he’s refused. As a matter of fact, that’s where the baby-led weaning theory falls apart for us. His satiety cues seem to be broken, or maybe he’s still recovering from his early hunger issues, but he will eat and eat and eat until he’s eaten the cubic equivalent of his body weight and then go back for more!
I haven’t completely abandoned the spoonfeeding, though. For one thing, I think one of the great joys of life with a baby is watching that round little mouth in an O of expectation as baby waits for the next spoonful. Second, I’m rounding out his veggie intake with purees because he doesn’t have any teeth yet, and even steamed veggies are a little tough to masticate without them. And third, I still want him to have iron-fortified cereal every couple of days (although he eats tonnes of bread — it’s his favourite!) and we’ve just introduced those fromage frais minis that babies love so much.
But I wanted to say a public and thorough thank you to Marianne for opening my eyes to baby-led weaning, and to let y’all know about it, too. It’s a direction I was drifting on my own, but after a spin around the interwebs I found lots of stuff that’s helped me implement the majority of the theories of baby-led weaning.
