Baby seemingly can’t swallow

[Al991]

I started weaning at 6 months and baby is now 7 months (31 weeks). I’m having a nightmare with weaning and not sure if it’s normal.

Whenever my baby takes a tiny bite of food she then can’t seem to swallow it. She will leave it in her mouth for a long time and I put that down to her still learning the skill/reflex. But when she DOES swallow she gags every time and throws up the whole content of her stomach. Even if it’s the tiniest piece. The HV says try giving water when she gags but this just expedites the throwing up by pushing it down, then it comes back up.

Is this normal? Could there be something physiological that is preventing her from swallowing?

She is fine swallowing milk and keeping it down. Very thin purées she can swallow but stuff like porridge she gags on, even if I blend the oats first to make them smaller.

One of mine struggled with lumps and would gag. I just kept her to purée for longer. She got there in the end.

My DC3 was the same. Couldn’t really get the chewing part of eating.
we just gave up fur a bit and kept her on milk.

it took her a little longer to crawl, potty train abd walk too. She does have inattentive ADhD, but is otherwise usual.

If she's swallowing milk ok then it could just be that she has an exceptionally strong gag reflex and any lump or 'bits' in her food are triggering this.
It's still early days - keep offering and see what happens. DS was quite a gaggy baby - not quite this bad but he didn't properly grow out of it entirely until he was 3+ years old. He was eating most foods ok by 12 months though- just struggled when new tastes / textures were introduced for another couple of years.

That’s quite early for lumpy food, I think. Only one month in? Stick to smooth for a bit longer, but let it get thicker. The thickness turns to lumps rather than being thin with lumps if you see what I mean.

At the moment there are new flavours to get used to, as well as the mechanism of moving the food off a spoon into the mouth and down the throat. That’s a lot!

One of mine did better with thick food from the get go. But we were weaning at 4 months so by 7 months they’d been doing it ages! Take your time. Under one, it’s just for fun.

Nowadays with baby led weaning the implication is that you’re meant to skip purées entirely and the HV continues to tell me to do this. I’ve been giving them though because of this swallowing issue.

I think I’ll just have to do milk/purée for a bit longer.