to think it's mental to religiously stick to baby-led weaning (finger foods only)?

[Ficuslover]

I think finger foods are fine, but isn't it weird to favour them exclusively? My friend's baby is under the 10th percentile at 8 months and can't get enough in his mouth! She won't give him anything with a spoon and his breakfast is a weetabix biscuit with a splash of milk on it. Yum. Surely it's not bad to give then some sloppy foods now and again? Why do some people have to take things so literally?

Totally agree Aitch - DC2 especially was effectively BLWd, but I did spoon-feed her as well, so I basically am not allowed to say I did BLW.

Great if BLW in its entirely pure, undiluted state works for you, but I think most people with half a brain and an ounce of faith in their own instinct will mix and match to a greater or lesser extent.

I think BLW is great for helping you to basically chill out over the whole thing, as it encourages you to give your baby any sort of food at all, rather than the sorts of (often quite bland) food that can be easily pureed, but mostly because it keeps you focused on milk being their main diet until 1, so you're not as continually fixated on 'what are they getting?' 'are they getting enough?' 'how much has s/he eaten for that meal?' type paranoia.

Which is where I personally think the OP could take a leaf out of her friend's book.

Why do people think you can force feed a baby with a spoon? My son is on antibiotics at the mo and I'm having a hell if a job getting him to open his mouth to take the medicine.

He would just clamp his mouth shut if he didn't want anymore food from a spoon

I know, Moomin. Plus it's always 'force fed' with custard or chocolate pudding or some other sugar-laden, calorific slush, as opposed to fruit/veg/some sort of nutritious protein.

but he doesn't want to eat it, though, so that's a bit different.

i don't really think that BLWers speak in terms of 'force feeding' so much as irritated puree-ers do, but i reckon that what is being referred to is when people are spooning in that 'distract them and shove it in' (which i have 100% seen recommended on here, albeit not for yonks) manner, or even when children are encouraged to eat more than they might otherwise want if they didn't have their beloved mother smiling and nodding at them.

but i think that BLW is more of a mindset than a method, so therefore people can ABSOLUTELY be conscious of being 'led' by their baby regardless of how they feed them. some kids need to be weaned early, because of reflux or whatever, and it would be an absolute nonsense to suggest that they are being force fed when clearly it is the best thing for them and they are willing participants.

therefore i would contend that anyone who said you didn't do BLW because of using a spoon here and there is an idiot missing the point. but then they might just be new to the whole thing, and we all know that with parenting a bit of perspective is often key.

I have three babies, all BLW and all totally different experiences. I haven't spoon fed them because I don't think it's so urgent they get solids that they need me to. Milk is enough to sustain a baby beyond 6 months and will always have more calories and nutrients than anything else you can give.

#1, 31 weeker BLW commenced at 27 weeks (I wanted to delay to adjust, paediatrician scared me out of it) took to it immediately and by 7 months (so not even at 6 months corrected) was eating exactly what we were, cut up for her and usually managing the same as her cousins and finishing their plate!

#2, 35 weeker with IUGR. I decided this time I would adjust and by then it was the advice to, when we got to 6 months she most obviously wasn't ready, she looked in size and behaviour like a newborn. Seven months came and she still couldn't sit up, foods were dribbled back out (OK, I said I didn't spoon feed, didn't stop others trying) she was EBF until about 10 months, she'd then take tastes, get up and have milk. Approx 22 months she decided she liked solids. She was 3 this week and is just moving into 18-24 months clothes and weighs about the same as the average 10 month old. She eats constantly and fills her boots. Apart from being a standard IUGR baby there is nothing wrong with her, she's a fairly healthy little girl. She's been checked out by a paediatrician as the HV wanted to be sure (bit too specialised I guess) but he was very happy.

#3, 34 weeker, again wanted to correct (which is next week) but she is picking things up and gnawing, however although she's enjoyed tastes of things she hasn't actually been bothered about eating so far, most comes back all soggy.

If CMOT comes here she has some brilliant old parenting manuals that have descriptions of weaning babies that start a lot later than 6 months.

I get really irritated by BLW V Puree arguments!

Its all bollocks. It really is! Baby led weaning as a title annoys the hell out of me because it implies that if you dont do it then you are somehow disregarding your childs needs in favour of your own. Which is not true for most parents.

Just feed the child! If you know your baby, and I hope that we all do, you will soon learn what they prefer. I did ....grrrrr....BLW before it was an official choice, with DD1 who is now 14. Because she preferred it that way. She would snatch the spoon off me, take food from my plate etc. DD4 is somewhere in between, she likes to have a spoon but makes kissing noises when she wants some more dinner and thats my cue to feed her! When she stops kissing then she has had enough (imagine how gutted I was when I realised she wasnt actually kissing me :( ).

Each to their own, and if the OPs friend is going OTT then her HV will soon pick up on it and guide her to a more sensible way of feeding.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant, and not having a go at either feeding method btw, but the angst that each can create!

Off to bed, I feel better now!

moomin, my eldest has been on some form of medication from birth and I don't think it's ever got any easier! Actually, she's 5 now and she's pretty good, worst bit is getting her to tell her teachers to give it to her.

confuddled, surely she shouldnt have to tell them? Expecting a 5 year old to remember her meds isnt on, I wouldnt be happy if I was you.

Yes, I know I said I was going to bed....

Yes, it's bit of an issue! She's just started with teacher #3 of the year and the previous teacher would forget to make up her drinks (despite the fact that they all have a cup of water apart from my daughter who has a flask of squash, so it's not so far out of routine) and she's supposed to have inhalers before going outside but if she gets past them I can see why they would forget. When they do forget she's too shy to say that she needs them (despite sitting on my bed in the morning when I haven't woken up yet nagging me to do them!)

Hopefully now we have a permanent teacher things will get better. I'm going to have a word tomorrow hopefully if I can get to her on time!

ignore the name, Bogeyface, why do you think people who actually do it call it BLW or 'er, i just let him/her feed him/herself'? because the name is not important, and just an unfortunate point of conflict for people who want to be irritated at something that isn't what they did.

Hmm...why do they call it that? Because an "expert" coined the phrase probably, as is usually the case and it got printed in M&B or similar and caught on. I would probably call it Mixed Weaning because most people, unlike the OPs friend, dont exclude spoon feeding and helping to feed the baby, but the baby feeds itself as much as it can.

Its just one of those irrational things that annoy me, like the Haribo adverts...bear with me...in that it doesnt impact on my life but really gets my goat :o

I've never heard of this term before. A quick Google seems to indicate that the parents who frequent the local KFC with their under twos are doing it all right. I wasted so much time mashing carrots, courgettes, banana. I really, really don't understand this.

Im pretty sure KFC exceeds the recommended amount of salt....

I agree Bogeyface-the name irritates me to death. I don't mind the concept, but the name should be accurate. It is mother led and the baby eats exactly what and when, mother decides-heaven help anyone who offered it KFC!
If it was really baby led, and the baby could talk, they would probably say 'I really fancy some mashed carrot-could you please help me with a spoon'!
It is like all these fashionable things -do a mix-use some of it but go with your instinct.

Agree exotic and mine would probably say, I know I keep taking the spoon off you but please stop letting me, I can't use the stupid thing and just ram it down my throat till I gag.

Ds3 was a 32 weeker and advice now is to feed them from 5 months onwards due to prem babys iron stores depleting earlier than full term babys. He certainly loved food but lacked the fine motor skills to pick it up and put it in his mouth.

He was 9 months before he could feed himself and still can't use a spoon, so ii weened feeding him mashed food, just because people use a spoon to feed their baby doesn't mean they liquidise everything. He was given fruit and veg, not custard and chocolate btw

However he did steal some chocolate cake off his brother at Christmas , but he didn't seem to enjoy it as much as carrots and broccoli.

Sticking to anything religiously, especially in the face of contrary evidence, is mental.

I find it easier to simply blame Annabel Karmel for EVERYTHING

lol.. Prehaps your friend should come and visit me. It sounds like she could do with some kinder friends. Having a baby on the 9th centie is normal. Babies aren't turkeys being fatterned for christmas.

Dd weight been on the 0.4th centile although we are moving the dizzy hieghts of the 2nd centile. We had the health visitor round several times last year and she even watch dd eat lunch. She was very happy with the amount of food dd was eating. We saw the health visitor last June for a two year check and I was told she is advanced for her development.

My dd point blank refuse to eat food from a spoon. She ate nothing but finger food until she had the coordination to feed herself. I didn't choose to do baby led weaning, but the window of opportunity had well and truely closed for introducing a spoon by the time we started weaning at 24 weeks. A child who eats nothing but finger foods still has a lot of milk in their diet

The advantages of finger foods is that they improve hand eye coordinaton. It also improves fine motor skills as the baby gets practice with the pincher grip. The baby also builds muscles in the mouth that are later used for speech.

The only thing more horrid than worries about your child putting on weight is judgemental people. For example dd had to go to A and E because she had hit her head on our sideboard at 16 months old. The doctor was more concerned with her wearing 3 to 6 month clothes than her actual injury. The radiologist was surprised to to see a child so tiny walking about and speaking in sentences.

Why do people think you can force feed a baby with a spoon?

I didn't mean to suggest force feeding exactly in my post before - making children eat when they don't want to is one of those mythical skills like making them go to sleep when they don't want to that we've probably all wished for at times! What I did mean was 'just one more bite' etc and there's a fair bit of that about. I think a significant percentage of human beings are happy to eat just a bit more than they really need if it happens to be something they like - and the things we like after babyhood do tend to be the things that are fat and sugar laden. You don't often see people struggling not to eat another raw carrot but we've all thought 'oh, just one more biscuit'.

I also think that this is probably a bad habit for the vast majority of us as most people tend to struggle with losing weight rather than putting it on. So I suppose my point was that it's probably better not to encourage that kind of thing early on, even if it is only carrot or banana to start with. Obviously not all parents feeding with spoons would do this, in fact I hope most wouldn't. And maybe it wouldn't really make much of a difference later on, but who knows?

it was Gill Rapley who coined the term, she was at the time a HV of some 25 years' standing and the deputy director of the Unicef Baby Friendly Initiative, so she's pretty well qualified... at the time she coined the imperfect term BLW she was just a person doing an extra qualification for work, part of which was a research thesis, and having seen a lot of 'problem eaters' in her working life she was interested in investigating whehter children would enjoy self-feeding more. it was off the back of the research paper, which was published in a nursing journal, that parents started to hear about it. there was no great publicity slew by Rapley, believe me... when i did it with DD there were about five hits on Google for the term.

it's been a pretty organic trend, i think, it's hardly the Dukan Diet being serialised in the Daily Mail... so it is fair enough to say 'ignore the term' as basically it doesn't describe what actually goes on with the weaning, more what was going on at the time she wrote it (ie the strict Karmel system), which she felt was failing a lot of children.

there has been research done, btw, into BLW, the results being that 94% of kids can do this at six months, so really it is suitable for teh vast majority of children. and there is no way my children were asking me non-verbally for some mashed carrot. who honestly eats mashed carrot? it's something we only inflict on small kids who can't answer back...

OP, I agree!

I never had any intention to do BLW. Just not my bag. I immediately did purees. DS LOVED them. Other mums were never critical but made comments about how I would be delaying his development for eating solid food blah blah blah.

At 17 months, everything has balanced out. My boy is a strapping boy, tall and very solid (90th centile), scoffs anything and everything. He will take me spoon feeding, or he will spoon feed himself, or he will use his hands and shovel it in.

All these silly debates mean so much when youare in the middle of it. And then you emerge, blinking in the sunlight, and think to yourself, thank fu*k that is over and done with!

I started on blw - you can give them a preloaded spoon and they feed themselves.

now doing tw so mixture of spoon and finger foods but I feel ds eats so well as he had a nice introduction to food and he got to explore lots of tastes and textures.

we changed to tw as I started back to work and the nursery spoon fed and I liked knowing how much he had eaten.

if your dc is staying on the same percentile it is fine tho it's only if they lose weight you worry - my ds went up from 50th to 75th after we started blw so they can survive on it and thrive too. But if your friends dc was always on the 10th percentile then there is no need to worry or question her parenting choice

YANBU OP. I 'did' BLW with ds3 and it was mostly great, but his appetite outstripped his coordination and he got very frustrated by not being able to get food in quickly enough with this fingers. I posted on the BLW Yahoo group about whether it was OK to preload his spoon and was firmly told by the rest of the group that it wasn't 'proper' BLW So I do think there's a bit of a tendency by some hardline BLW-ers to get a bit bogged down in the 'rules' and miss sight of the baby-led bit!

i do think (and i mean no offence to our American cousins, this is just what i have observed) that where there are larger numbers of Yanks, there is a tendency to be more hardline about stuff like this. i wonder if it's something to do with deciding to take an alternative 'stance' rather than just doing whatever is easiest for you? dunno. i've noticed in on the FB group as well. (Not my site's FB group, i hasten to add, another one. i am all over hardliners like a rash... not my style).

Honeydragon - I totally would blame Annabel Karmel - I've tried the tasteless mini gingerbread men, and the absolutely foul blackcurrant oaty bars (since my 16 month old flat refuses to eat them).. I haven't plucked up the courage to try peach flavoured raisins (or whatever horror it is) yet though.

Mine stuffed finger foods in his mouth on his own, but has only just managed to reliably manoeuver a spoon into his mouth laden with yoghurt/porridge so I didn't technically BLW. He always just had some of what we're having though, and is a very sensible boy who'll turn down chocolate drops/biscuits when he's had enough, and tries pretty much anything put in front of him.

YANBU if she's being odd about BLW, just as if she was still feeding jars and nothing but.. on the other hand, if the kid is doing OK, then it's none of your business.

Hardline BLW is rather arbitrary anyhow - why stop at what they can stuff in their mouth themselves - why not put it back to when they can get it out of the fridge/cupboard/garden themselves