Baby Weaning

A Quick Guide to Baby Weaning and the Baby-Led Weaning Technique - Are You Having Trouble?

By Nick Bright

This baby weaning process relies on your baby's natural desire to reach for foods and start to put things in their mouths. This natural curiosity starts from about the age of six months.

By offering a small choice of finger food to your baby and allowing him to feel, taste, smell and self-feed means there is no pressure or force feeding from you as a parent and encourages your baby's natural curiousity. This baby weaning technique has proved successful when weaning babies onto solid food.

If you are having trouble weaning your baby by spoon feeding purees or if your baby suddenly decides to take a disliking to your approach, then baby led weaning might be the answer to your problems!.

What follows are simple baby weaning guidelines to help you on your way:

Baby led weaning do's and dont's

Do....

• Offer a range of colours, shapes and textures in the food to stimulate your baby's senses.
• Try to make your own baby weaning foods by following some easy recipes that will follow.
• Please make sure you test new foods on your baby for allergic reactions first by following the 'Four Day' rule.
• Allow plenty of time for your baby's to finish their food during a meal time.
• Try to synchronise your famil meal time with the baby's. Your baby will learn more by imitating your actions.

Do not....

• Provide food which is high in sugar or salt. This includes processed foods like chocolate, crisps and sweets. They do not need those foods nor do they benefit from the sugar or salt in the food. High levels of salt and sugar is harmful to your baby.
• Do not leave your baby unsupervised with food.
• Do not give your baby cutlery.

There are some real advantages when baby weaning using this technique:

• It allows your baby to join in with the family at meal times by eating similar food all the while allowing you some time to eat your own meal
• baby led weaning encourages a less fussy attitude towards food and helps develop your baby's natural curiosity to try things at least once.
• Your baby's motor skills (like the small movements of your baby's arms, fingers and hands) and chewing skills are developed.

However there are some small disadvantages!:

• Handing over full control of feeding to your little one can only mean a lot of mess! You will need to accept this as part of the process.
• Not all food can be formed into hand finger food shapes. We got round this with some clever recipes which you can find at the end of this article.
• You may have a fear of your baby choking. Do not let this worry you as babies have already developed natural choking and vomiting reflexes. A baby will also not develop the ability to move food to the back of the mouth until they know how to swallow solid food. It's all natural.
• You may find you throw \ clean up more food than goes into your baby!

Making baby weaning food yourself

Do not be worried about cooking food for your baby. When food is prepared from fresh ingredients by their own mother, this is the best and most nutritious food they can get! Our website has lots of baby weaning recipes such as this Egg free Blueberry pancakes and delicious Black Bean Finger burgers.

It also explains the Four Day Rule. The author of this article is the webmaster of weaningbabyfood.com which is host to plenty of baby weaning purees, baby finger foods and baby weaning techniques for you to try.