to think that someone who works in paediatrics should know better than to wean at 20 weeks?

[vampirebankholidayweekend]

none of business what age they wean, I know.

It is a member of my family, she has decided to start weaning her son, who is 2 weeks younger than my DD, which would make him 19 weeks this week. She has said he is particularly hungry and her health visitor has managed to pursuade her to hold off til 20 weeks!
Even my mother, who weaned us at about 3 months (as was the advise in those days) has tried to convince her it;s probably a growth spurt.
She is a paediatric nurse

The problem is that advice changes all the time. I have an 8 week old DS and during my pregnancy the advice on alcohol comsumption seemed to change weekly. Similarly a colleague of mine said his 3 children were put to sleep on their front, side and back respectively as they were following current advice - they are all fine but he said imagine if something had happened to one of them? They were made to feel that they had done wrong with the first two. How do you know that in a couple of years they won't have done yet more research and the advice will be to wean at 12 weeks again?

I'm just going to follow my instincts and wean DS when he seems ready!

Well I am with TikTok, voice of reason.

Surely from first principles a baby is ready for food when it can grab it, take it to its mouth and chew? That is what the other apes do (I don't think they have blenders or baby rice). This happens around 6 mo in humans.

So, OP, YANBU.

My friend is friends with a Paediatrician who is very high profile. He advised her to wean her ds at 20 weeks. He said that for some babies it is best to wait until they are closer to 26 weeks but others can be ready to be weaned from 17 weeks onwards.

With everything I do I consider the guidelines and the risks and I then make an informed decision. I am confident in my abilities as a parent to know that sometimes it isn't essential to do everything by the book.

tbh what worries me more than anything is the fact that people seem to take the advice of a bunch of strangers on the internet over that of health professionals. In fact there seems to almost be an accepted code of "heard if from a mw/hv? it's obviously rubbish and you should listen to mumsnet instead."

And IMO it's concerning because it seems that while generally people on mn give advice based on the research, sometimes the advice given is based on their own emotional pov.

e.g. co-sleeping is generally discouraged - even on sids guidelines. But if you advised someone not to co-sleep then you would be shot down because mn'ers co-sleep with their babies. Yet the same mn'ers would happily tell you that weaning at four months is wrong, so bit of a double standard really.

Research is always ongoing. And there's nothing to say that weaning guidelines won't be changed again, so IMO it's best to just go with your baby and do what is best for all of you.

As for alergies, there are surely far greater contributing factors than just early weaning, given that babies have been weaned much earlier than even sixteen weeks for deckades and alergies have only recently increased dramatically.

Of course it's possible that the additives in foods might be a contributing factor, as well as other environmental contributors.

Actually though Wannabe there are ways to co-sleep and drop the risk factors (I have this little nbed thing that you slip overyour duvet,, ds4 slept in there protected from blankets... best of both worlds).

BLW isnt just an internet thing, but I have actually met Gill rapley at a seminar- pre- BLW (was a breastfeeding thing) but she did strike me as a very sensible woman indeed. WHO are also pretty good as well I think.

But yes its important not to be just led by MN, but no more important than not to be led by MIl's / etc etc who read the guidelines under a different era; as someone who BF against MIL advice you do see wider peer pressure on here often and it generally has about as much a link to medical guidelines as it has to the tales of Enid Blyton

HCPs can be the same- as an example take the HCP insistence on labour if your watersbreak; generally it allows far less leeway than NICE guidelines do.

Getting advice rfom HCPs and peer group doesn't autiomatically equate to good advice but it should be listened to, in collaboration (wrong word, brain dead) with other advice.One of the best things about MN is that it can act as a signpost to WHO guidelines, BLW info, NICE information etc.

Yeah, I dont get what advantages there are to early weaning either - DD was Excl BF for 4 months, then mix fed for 2. I didn't try to wean until after 6 months (she was 5 wks prem).

It was 6 months out of my life where I didn't have to think about food, where she always had her 'dinner' on tap, where she kept clean, where I could calm her in seconds and when she woke in the night I could just latch her on and drift back to sleep lol.

I would have happily waited longer if only to cut down the endless wash cycles when most of what I was feeding her ended up ON rather than IN both of us.

All weaning bought me was a kid that slept less, cried more, was covered in sticky orange mess, stinking nappies and even more time in the kitchen.

Early weaning - stuff that, I'm gonna petition WHO to make the guidlines 12 months if I ever have another!

i wouldn't assume a paed nurse to know much about weaning tbh, no more than any other average mother anyway, if they happen to be a mother. same as i wouldn't assume a gp would. these are people trained..potentially a long time ago..in illness, not normal day to day being. hence why they know not a right lot about things like breastfeeding, cos that isn't an illness.

I am not a zoologist, but I do know that some mammals chew the food to a pulp and then spit it into their babies' mouths. So the argument about it being natural not to feed a baby until they can grab food and chew it themselves simply does not stand up to scrutiny.

Peachy - really random off topic point - did you meet Gill in Cardiff by any chance? I saw her speak there during breastfeeding awareness week a couple of years ago and noticed you were fairly local...

Dumbledoresgirl - was only analogising with the other apes. Do they do this? I am genuinely interested and have tried googling but to no avail.

peppa you'd have thought wouldn't you? No, in Somerset, work event.
Actually one of her colleagues IIRC was my MW with ds1 as well, whand rather excellent. So I suppose my faith in her, the whole WHO thing goes back to there.

BCLass, I wish I could remember which animal it was. I can't, but I saw it on a David Attenborough progamme iirc. My mother is very up on zoology and could tell me...

as you say none of your business.

I weaned DD at 21 weeks - she was ready she had a bit of sweet potato she's 7 now going great guns

I weaned DS at 18 weeks - he was ready and he had some banana
miraculously he lived to tell the tale!

As parents WE make our choices.

"they" keep changing their minds why do we keep following?
what happened to being able to follow instincts?

I weaned DS earlier than the "books" say
my choice I gave him 2 spoons of banana every morning

My lo's began weeing at 12 and 10 weeks.
They are both good healthy kids with no allergies.Reccomendations are just that,they are not gospel.We went with what we felt was right.
x

All 3 of mine (10,8 + 6) weaned at 12 weeks. They are all alive and well!!!! I weaned at 8 weeks as was the advice 32 years ago - I am also alive and well!!!!

20 weeks isn't a shocking time to wean. That is almost 5 months.

Advice now is to wean at 6 months. Maybe next year it will be 9 months and people will be all judgy at you, for no good reason, except that they've been told it's the good time.

DD was weaned at 4 months, as was the advice at the time around here. Nobody died. She has no food allergies.

Seriously. Don't you have anything else to do?

When my DD1 was born 8 years ago the advice I was given at the time was to wean at 4 months. She wasn't a particularly hungry baby so I 'held off' until about 5 months (20 wks) and thought I'd done 'well' to do this. And now this is considered terrible to do?
Just shows how the advice changes. (BTW she has no allergies or problems at all, never has done).

Probably the advice will change again in a year or two......pinch of salt I reckon

I'd leave her to get on with weaning her child when and how she sees fit. If she's a nurse I'm sure she's intelligent and well informed. And of course has her child's best interests at heart.

Ah, thought I had met a real life mumsnetter...well been in the same room as her anyway. There goes my excitement for the day lol!

I, like Cote, weaned both of mine at 4 months back in the stone ages of the mid nineties and they were fine.

I feel sorry for the poor buggers having to watch their parents tucking into yummy dinners till they're six months old.

But I am ancient and know nowt.

But Mumblechum - if they have no idea of what food tastes like how do they know its going to be tasty? They may want to copy you but they wont know it tastes good...

Saying that my DD tried to wean herslf onto a slice of pizza she stole from my plate when I wasnt looking at about 17 weeks lol. I also remember trying to eat a chinese on top of DS when he was feeding - a little hand came over the top of the plate and grabbed a spring roll - he could have only been 12 weeks

I do wonder how both of mine have survived being taken into social srvices care
this is my list of crimes
both were ff
both were weaned at 16 weeks
both had disposable nappies
both went straight into their own rooms as soon as we got back from hospital

what an awful mother i am

Came across this thread unintentionally - quite shocked how much things have changed sice my sons were this age (18 & 14 now) both weaned at 13 weeks, both tall, althletic and healthy, no problems, think this must be a fashion thing.

as someone who teaches paed nurses can I just add that the focus of the course is not healthy infants it forms a part of the course but the main focus is on the management and care of sick children the majority of paed nurses work in hospital caring for sick children I wouldn't expect them to be experts on weaning and she may have done her course eons ago when the guidance was different
our students are taught the current WHO and DOH guidance on weaning but they would not be updated again once they did their intial training as there are more important areas of knowledge that they need updating on
weaning advice in healthcare is on the whole the responsibility of hv
now you could argue that they should all have up to date knowledge but most staff already need 10 to 12 study days a year to keep them up to date on things like resuscitation etc so weaning is not a priority for this group
you can all jump on me now but for example my own clinical career was in intensive care looking after children who had open heart surgery weaning wasn't really a big issue

purepurple where has anyone said that? We're dicussing awareness of guidelines, how important they are. Nobody has said that to you.

"Awareness of guidelines" is a rather mild way of putting OP's at a baby being weaned at 20 weeks, though, isn't it?