To be worried about my niece

[Eolhc1990]

My sister has a 12 week old baby girl. For some reason she has decided to ignore all health advice and start her on solid food at this early age. Health advice says to wait until 6 months. This baby cannot hold her head steady or sit up yet. I think the only reason she is starting her on solids is so that she will sleep for longer.
I have read about the risks of weaning too early but I don't know whether I should Express my concerns to my sister. I think she will take it as a criticism and tell me to mind my own business.
Have any of you mums weaned this early and the child has been fine?

I thought one of the reasons they advise later is for allergies, and also the digestive system isn't mature enough to cope with some foodstuffs, so things with gluten are advised to be given later (or they were when DS was a baby)

Bearing in mind my MIL was not only recommending rusks at a very early age but also brandy to help with sore gums, so I wasn't particularly impressed with that advice either.

[quote roxfox]@1Morewineplease

Wow that's terrifying. I'm preparing to start blw and that's scared me quite a bit. Had your dd been on purées etc before or had she always been eating solids from the start of weaning? Do you have advice you can share in retrospect?[/quote]
I didn’t mean to terrify you.. majority of babies are fine on BLW.
Advice , when I had my daughter , who is now 25, was to wean onto purées at 4 months but there was leeway as all babies are different.
I was advised to wean her at around the 14 week stage by HV and it all went well.
Trouble is , and with hindsight I was very stupid, I’d given her grated cheese.
Grated cheese forms into a solid ball while you’re chewing it, and so it got stuck in her throat.
The only reason that she is alive is because a quick witted neighbour ( oh how I screamed) actually hoiked it out with her nail from my daughter’s throat ... something you should never do., but as my daughter was blue and had gone limp and about 3 or 4 minutes had passed , it was the last resort .
Please don’t follow my advice , based on a rare story, but I do think that mums know best when it comes to their babies. Something that my GP told me.

3 months corrected child, are you stupid mum?

Using the term corrected, I assume you are talking about a preemie. Weaning is the only thing you use actual age for and that advice hasn’t changed since I had my preemie in 2009. We weaned at 3 months corrected (5.5 months actual) on advice from her preemie consultant. We had the same finger wagging from the health visitor but I put her back in her box and told her she needed to read up on preemies.

I've never understood the 'big baby' thing. A bit of mashed up carrot or broccoli in the tiny amount you can get into a 4 month old that can't really chew or swallow it properly isn't going to be any more filling for them than calorie dense milk, surely?

I waited until 6 months purely because it made sense to me that babies are ready for solids when they are physically capable (in most cases, medical exceptions exist obviously) of putting it their mouths themselves and swallowing it rather than dissolving things in milk. It just made sense that it would mean that their digestive systems were ready for weaning off milk. It seems like a natural order of things that humans are ready for things when they are capable of doing it. But who knows.

Each to their own though but 12 weeks does sound pretty risky to me. There's not much you can though other than talk it through with her if she's willing but everyone gets defensive over these sort of choices, so it may not go well!

Did they not used to say wean at 3 months? Leave her to it she knows her baby YABU. if I had another i wouldnt wait till 6 months either.