to wonder why anyone wouldn't BLW?

[Claz1001]

It sounds great for both baby and lazy parent. Definitely the way I'll be weaning my DS soon! Why bother with purees if you don't have to? Why doesn't everyone do this? Maybe I am missing something

sausages - fgs i already said puree wasn't poison. but pardon my irritation but i have read it dozens of times on these thread oh scofff scoff, babies without teeth cant possibly chew'

and really - let the mother choose?? who do you think puts the food in front of the baby during blw? do you think we just leave the fridge door open and a stool next to it?

Some babies are too young to hold a spoon and feed themselves...

mashed is equivalent to puree'd....practically!

what did babies eat before blenders were invented i wonder......?

Dietary info (all round) changes all the time and often reverts to original thought...

I would think most mothers were perfectly capable of feeding their babies...they don't need another stupid acronym (and yes I do hate those) to describe a term that's always existed to some degree....

sun....that supposed clever comment was actually really stupid!

Before blenders...people mashed, and ground and grated...and all sorts.

If you do BLW if a baby is too young to hold a spoon they are too young to eat solids.

the idea is milk provides the nutrition until they are old enough to feed themselves. in the meantime, every time a baby picks up food and plays with it, looks at it and mushes it up, tries to eat it and throws it on the floor, the baby is learning about how different foods look, feel and taste, and they are learning how to bite chew and swallow and improve their hand eye coordination and fine motor skills and so on. while they are practising all this they drink plenty of milk which remains their main nutrition until they get so good at eating they can eat a good amount at mealtimes. then their milk consumption decreases. that is the idea behind blw.

My nan used to chew food then feed it to the baby thats what they did before blenders (and forks lol)!

I am a huge fan of BLW. DD1 is nearly 7 and when she was weaned I spent bloody hours preparing various organic mush for her and then sitting there and slowly shovelling it into her. BLW was pretty unheard of then.

DD2 is 9 months and I started BLW at 5.5 months. Was a bit sceptical when I first heard about it but I read the book and decided to give it a go. I am so glad I did, weaning has been so much more fun, DD2 will eat anything she can get her paws on and it has been brilliant for her co-ordination. The same week that she turned 6 months we went out for a curry and she was sat on a booster seat in the curry house tucking into her own chicken korma and rice, with poppadoms and naan bread, and scoffed the lot with her fingers!

It is so much less hassle than having to prepare separate things for her. And when you think about it, blenders have been around for a very short space of time, BLW would have been how babies have been weaned for billions of years which I guess is why they take to it so naturally and easily. She did gag a few times for the first couple of weeks but she rectified it herself and wasn't at all worried about it.

The only time I spoon feed her is if she is eating something really runny, e.g yoghurt, just because I am too lazy to spend the next hour cleaning up the devastation she has caused.

I'm glad it didn't exist when I had my babies. One more thing to get neurotic about it seems.

I also had my DD before the BF v FF silly season.

Consequently, I didn't have much to beat myself up about. I just heated up a bottle of milk for her and popped open a jar of baby food and shovelled it in. Easy! She's doing well at university, no thanks to her atrocious start in life

I have never heard of this ?

What is the problem with spoons ?

I have read the whole thread :)

Before I started weaning I thought the same. However (and I have had similar experience all three times) by 6 months my DC were waking up in the night more (hungry) but not especially interested in finger food (basically playing with it hardly anything went in). I was going back to work and really needed them to ingest some food so they would not need milk in the night.

For me choice was spoon in puree 3x a day and cut down to 4-5 milk feeds and baby sleep all night or give BLW foods baby not really eat anything and be up in the night feeding. Yes I know milk more calorific that solids, but for all 3 of my DC they didn't consistently sleep well at night until they had a decent amount of solids.

BTW totally disagree with lazy parent comment - feeding a puree takes a couple of minutes BLW meals take much longer and much more cleaning up. PLus not all adult meals are BLW friendly. Needs to be solid but soft enough to chew without teeth. IME purees much easier to make.

Also DS1 had a gag reflex couldn't eat lumps until around 18 months without gagging and throwing up. And DD was low down on charts so HV wanted me to add butter to veggies.....

So lots of reasons why someone might not.

I didn't blw. I did a mix of purees and finger foods, it worked well for us. By 8 months Ds didn't need anything pureed anyway and now at 17 months he happily feeds himself pretty much anything.

Surely the important thing is that the child is getting what they need from the food not the method that is used to get there.

Sounds like something a first time mother would care deeply about tbh.

Just give them whatever your having, easy peasy. With dd we just gave her a plateful of whatever we were eating, if she was struggling a bit we'd help her.
It's just another thing for mothers to over complicate bringing up kids to me.

By the time their 5, they will be nagging your ear off for chocolate anyway

"apparently less fussy eaters "

hahahahahahahahahahha! I used to believe that old chestnut for the first few months of BLW, and now my daughter is as fussy as any child, and hasn't touched a lot of foods she happily munched and sucked on in the beginning for ages.
Still liked BLW and will do it again, as it's the lazy option...

To answer the original question - a lot of it is to do with the fact that like it or not, the majority of parents wean before six months. And before six months, they're not really able to sit up unaided and smear food all over themselves feed themselves.

I loved BLW. But it involves a bit of a leap of faith. You don't really know how much is going in - and you have to accept that for the first couple of weeks it's not an enormous amount! DD took to it beautifully. If we have another it'll be an interesting test of my mettle if the next one doesn't get the hang of it within a few weeks.

I didn't know about it.

Seriously.

I thought that you had to start them on purees.

This was only 11 years ago.

It was the advice from hv and in the books I read.

I would imagine that many new parents were the same. For my first child, I trusted the hv. I knew nothing and they were the experts.

Now my children are 10 & 11 and they eat just fine.

And all those things that seemed so vitally important when they were babies are long gone and forgotten.

I think parents should look at blw as another option they might try or their baby might like, not as something they should do or should feel pressured to do. What's really evident in this thread is that all babies are different and different feeding methods suit different babies. It seems that some babies open their mouths and want the food in NOW and some babies (like both mine) look at the spoon with suspicion, shut their mouths tight, but reach out to hold the food themselves. And parents prefer one method over another for different reasons. All fine as long as everyone happy and enjoying feeding/eating experience.

Oh yes WidowWadman totally agree with BLW making no difference to faddy eating - my DS1 shovelled everything right up until the age of 3. He would eat any fruit and veg he could get his hands (or spoon) on and I was mighty smug about it, let me tell.

Then at the age of 3 he started to reject all fruit and quite a lot of veg. I reminded him of this last night as he sat there, a tall, well built nearly 11 yr old and he looked at me like to think that he had ever stole bits of the green stuff we call pepper from me. Now even if I chop it up really small as I did last night for a spag bol he still manages to track it down and whinge. Fussy eaters don't necessarily start at birth - they can develop later on. Weaning is only one tiny step in a life time of eating!

I would also say that it isn't the way the food that is delivered that is important it is more important to worry about what is delivered. Chicken nuggets and chips would make an ideal BLW food from a texture point of view but maybe not ideal from a nutritional point of view. I think some of you are getting het up on the wrong issue frankly.

YABU - it's not compulsory. I did it with DS1 and will try with DS2 (who is a lot 'gaggier' so it'll be interesting to see if things go differently) but some babies just don't get on with finger foods that early.

As for why some people choose not to:
-they aren't aware of it. It's still relatively obscure outside the MN bubble.
-previous 'scares' with other children choking or perceived to have choked would put a lot of parents off.
-some babies just don't get BLW.
-control issues with some parents.
-earlier weaners (eg. for severe reflux) can't use finger food because the baby isn't ready at that age.
-some people just like to do things the way they perceive is the norm!

When I had my kids no one even talked about 'weaning', it was just called putting on to solids. I can't believe what a big deal is made out of it. Books, websites devoted to the subject.
Personally I fed mashed up food, some jars and some finger foods. It wasn't difficult at all and I would do the same thing if I was having another baby now.

I did it with dd1 because she hated being fed. Dd2 too much of a stuff guts for it to work really well. She got frustrated and cross because she couldn't shovel it in quickly enough so I ended up feeding her.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I can honestly say I don't care whether other parents choose to feed their babies puree or let them feed themselves.

I started on purees because I thought that was the only way of doing things - someone explained the BLW concept to me pretty early on and I stopped the purees and things went pretty smoothly from there.

As long as people are given correct information then they can choose to do whatever is easiest for them and suits their baby best. Purees aren't harmful. BLW isn't harmful. There are some people who argue that BLW helps a child's manual dexterity but since we don't have a whole generation of people who are incapable of using a fork I think we can safely conclude that puree weaning doesn't doom a child to a lifetime of being unable to use their hands.

By correct information I mean things like:

1. The signs of readiness for weaning
2. The fact that solid food isn't dangerous to a baby
3. The fact that it doesn't matter how much food the baby eats in the early stages of weaning.

As long as the information is available then I think this is probably one of those things that parents can be trusted to get on with without being lectured about making the "wrong" choice.

I wish no-one had come up with the cute little name. If we just called it "weaning onto solid food" I suspect there would be far fewer people getting smug and "in the club" about it, and far fewer people taking the piss out of it. Not least because it would take longer to type than "BLW is rubbish" or "BLW is great".

Oh and agree that blw makes for less fussy eaters is tosh. Dd1 at 18 months would eat anything except tuna and mashed potato and I as such a smug mummy ( as she shoveled down gridedcaubergine smothered in hummous!). At 5 she is a fussy little monkey.

Dd has rarely gagged, maybe twice? Doesn't bother her, and the difference between gagging and choking is obvious. It's amazing what she can eat with no teeth as well, people are always amazed. I find the dogs clear up any mess pretty quickly too! Going out for meals etc is so easy, she just has her own chair and gets on with it, very sociable.

Agree twofalls, dd1 is 3 and such a fussy eater!