To be shocked by this government dietary advice for babies and children?

The neurodiverse MNers will be turning up for you. Eat if you are hungry? Surely not!
However, the advice given in this NI leaflet is good nutrition on a basic diet which any can afford and (importantly) cook, assuming cooking facilities.
It is true that some families have no cooking facilities or not complete ones. This means food has to be heated on a hob or in a microwave. It it's shared facilities good luck with putting on a stew that takes up a quarter of the hob all day!
NB the children are hungry because they have not been given breakfast - chaotic home life/parents on shifts - not because they haven't eaten what is in front of them.

You've clearly never met an Autistic child with ARFID or many other reasons why children may have a limited diet that has nothing to do with giving in to tantrums.

You've contradicted yourself. You 'ate healthily' which means you understood what healthy eating was. So you were not in the position of ignorance you are saying you were. Bit of logic?
You are right about education, though.

@QuinqueremeofNiveneh
I don't see how you can point your finger at the food industry but not see how the NHS is doing their work for them with this guidance?

Oh, come off it. If every currently badly-fed child in the UK was eating this menu instead, they would be a lot healthier.

What I don't understand about this is that you describe children arriving at school hungry and later talk about foods that don't "appeal" to kids.

We all know what foods "appeal" to kids. They love salt, fat and sugar. Of course they do.

And I'm starting to get the impression that this is what drives the dietary advice and a lot of the attitudes from pp. That somehow what kids will agree to eat without a tantrum is what they should be given.

That's terrible!

A hungry, healthy kid will eat what's in front of them. Lead with that. Give them something healthy. Good for their waistlines, their teeth and probably their brains too.

This thread is peak MN at its best (worst?). Chia seeds, home made baked beans, home made bread, sour dough etc. it's all so far removed from the reality of many people's lives. So much drama over Rice Krispies once a week, and diluted fruit juice (which might be the only vitamin C a child sees all week).

I worked in a community dental clinic that did child teeth extractions under GA. Some of those poor children were so deprived; hair actually moving with nits, unkempt, dirty, they smelt and the state of their teeth was often desperate. Some caries were caused by fizzy drinks and squash, others by being fed formula/soft drinks from a bottle at night. Most people have probably never heard of bottle caries, let alone seen children with them.

These are the families this advice is aimed at. These children getting any sort of breakfast is a win. One that is fortified with vitamins and minerals, gold medal worthy.

Agree entirely. And the lack of NHS dentists and the ceasing of dental checks at school are the reasons for poor dental hygeine and children not seeing a dentist. I cherish like saffron my access to a NHS dental surgery because round here they are rarer than hens' teeth. Private dentists often won't offer the free dentistry DC are entitled to (doesn't pay enough). Parents are often unaware they are entitled to free dental care for their DC until 18.
That said, I don't see many children locally with poor teeth - but this is an afluent working class/lower middle class area.

It's both. They combine.

On a population level, porridge is more of a financial risk than rice krispies. This is because even where both are available in the same shops and so the costs of getting them are identical, culture means parents are more likely to know that rice krispies will be eaten by someone in the house. The porridge/other unfamiliar item is a greater risk.

If we were starting from an entirely blank slate then we could look only at what each item sells for. But we're not, because of culture. Uncertainty has a financial cost too.

I was one of those people when I first left home. But I managed to eat fairly healthily, even when living in a homeless hostel. Basic foods like cereal (!), fruit, baked potatoes (done in microwave), boiled veg. Made sure I got my 5 a day.

I think the biggest issue is education. I live in a relatively poor area now and see people buying crap unhealthy foods, but many of them do actually have more money than I did when on the bones of my arse. They just don't seem to know how to manage it.

re the fruit juice, I always encouraged this because I knew it counted as one of the five a day and it’s an easy way to get one in.

i still have a fruit juice with breakfast for exactly these reasons.

so while from a teeth point of view it might not be ideal it does help with the five a day, and fruit juice comes in cartons which keep easily.

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/5-a-day/5-a-day-what-counts/

Or children with allergies, SEN or other various dietary needs which can be even harder to manage with a limited budget.

I see very little (if anything) wrong with this advice.

I weaned and fed three children in a similar way to this, and cereal for breakfast, sometimes with juice if I had any was a staple.

I see some of the comments on threads such as this one and actually wonder how my children made it through their childhoods. They seem to have survived somehow and are healthy adults aged between 30 and 23. All well grown and with no fillings in their teeth.

Maybe I did something right after all. 🙄🤣

I don't think most DC will eat chia pudding and chia seeds are neither cheap nor easily available - I know this because my late DH wanted them and it took visits to several supermarkets and shops to find them. Doubtless you shop at Waitrose? Ours shut after an Aldi opened opposite, which happens to sell chia seeds!
Nothing is easier than opening a box of rice crispies and pouring milk on them, really!
You appear to live somewhere extremely affluent. And avocado is bad for the environment and very high in fat. Salmon's fine but I thought neither of your DC ate it?

Whilst NHS choices do need to be accessible suggesting juice when water is free is madness. It teaches children to prefer sweet things.

As regards the cost of cooking - Weetabix with milk and a banana is good. What’s going to be the next excuse?

This lack of aspiration for the poorest and most vulnerable from the people who purport to know them and support them is utterly baffling!

There is an underclass in Britain that's literally eating itself to (a slow, bloated and toothless) death.

You're being deliberately obtuse.

Porridge might be rank to you usedtobeaylis and many others but lots like it, especially as overnight oats with nuts and berries. I think the reason people say these things are ‘rank’ is sometimes because their taste buds have been destroyed by seriously rank processed food!

I tried overnight oats once. They were vile. And cold.

never heard of chia pudding before but it looks interesting I might try it. Not as a breakfast though. My breakfast is fruit juice, yoghurt, then about a pint of decaf coffee and toast.

more generally, I used to be a teacher.
as a school we had in breakfast bars because quite frequently kids would turn up in school not having had breakfast and they’d be hungry.

some years depending on what classes I had I used to bring in a pack of carrots and give them out in the first lesson as so many kids would be hungry and not have had breakfast at all. (Carrots was about the cheapest fruit or veg I could find that didn’t go off completely in the week).

some parents are living in temporary accommodation that has no cooking facilities at all. None. So they aren’t going to be doing scrambled eggs or anything like that.

the food bank near me is very careful what they give out in terms of expecting people to cook stuff as access to ovens/microwaves etc is difficult. Most people do have access to hobs but ovens can be expensive to run (especially if you are doing something like jacket spuds which need a long time).

sure, onions carrots and lentils are cheap. And when I was a student I pretty much lived off vegetable stews and chillis. But they aren’t the sort of meals that appeal to kids very much. Or adults frankly.

I hear what you believe, but does the conversation need to stop there?

I'm not at all convinced, so far, that eating healthy food is automatically more expensive.

It is much more likely that it is a cultural issue, as @MumofCandR says.

For example, @vanillalattes now says that the problem with porridge is not cost or availability, but taste and texture.

It's cheap and nutritious. (And absolutely delicious, I eat it most mornings myself. It's not gruel, it's soft and silky and just really lovely.)

It would be great if everyone could make the best choices for their babies, the reality is many people can’t. NHS advice needs to be accessible to all - there’s no point in recommending steamed sweet potato to support baby led weaning if mums can’t do that, don’t know how to steam and sweet potato and don’t have the fuel needed.

Your naive, middle class, sour dough making mumsnetters aren’t relying on the NHS to know how to feed their children. Breakfast cereal, fruit juice, aren’t bad choices per se regardless of whether a Rice Krispie has ever passed your child’s lips.

Porridge is absolutely rank and trying to force it on people is utterly bizarre. People aren't eating it because they don't want to and generally haven't found any way of mitigating the minging texture and awful taste. Stop banging on about fucking porridge.

It is true that some of this is about cultural habits, about what people are used to eating, what they see as normal (for a lot of people in the UK breakfast is cereal or toast, things like eggs or beans on toast are lunch or tea foods). But the thing is, these things do matter and are powerful and there's no point giving people guidance that ignores them. There's a really interesting part in Bee Wilson's book First Bites (which I'd recommend in general) where she talks about a very calorie and nutrition dense paste that was developed to give to severely malnourished children, which was based on peanuts. It was first used, to great success, in some parts of Africa - where peanuts are really commonly eaten. But then they tried to use it in Bangladesh, where peanuts are less common, and the kids outright refused it. Their parents had to force them to eat it, and lot wouldn't - this stuff seemed very unfamiliar and 'unfoodlike' to them. Again, these are starving kids in poverty - this isn't about 'fussy eaters' or indulged brats. The point is it isn't actually that easy to get people to start eating food that isn't part of their cultural norm even under those circumstances. People are comforted by the familiar and if you want them to eat better you're better off nudging than saying 'but why aren't you making chia pudding?'.

Seriously? Chia seeds. Overnight oats is easy, of course but I doubt many DC would eat it.
You are not accounting for shift patterns etc which many people have to deal with.

I see we're back to basically giving budgeting advice to the very people who are the most experienced in budgeting. You'd think the pattern of people with less resources buying longer-lasting and nutritionally incomplete options were doing it on purpose to annoy people who have never been in their situation but think they have all the answers.

I wouldn’t know.