My baby will not eat food!

[fifitot]

Forgive me for starting a new thread - I was on another one but can't find it. Essentially my 8m old doesn't eat food. I thought by now he would have settled in to eating but he just has no interest.

He was/is BF but at nursery 4 days pw where he will have a few oz of expressed or formula milk and eats a small lunch but a larger tea as probably starving by then. At home he just wants BFing though! Refuses breakfast and will have a couple of spoonfuls of dinner or tea but basically doesn't want to know. Last weekend he had no food whatsoever!

He will mess with finger food but won't eat it. He BFs about 4-5 times per day and this includes a couple at night. HV tells me to cut down on milk feeding but it's so difficult. If I try and give him food when he wants milk he screams the house down!

I know it takes a while to wean but really at 8m I would have thought some progress would have been made.

Any suggestions for helping him along?

Thanks for the idea Trillian - my DS is 10m soon and little progress is being made. I think 12 months must be a cut off for us too. I can't stand these night feeds!

I know loads and loads of babies who didn't eat much at all at 9/10 months, honestly, it will get better! If it helps at all DS ate loads when we first started weaning (BLW at 6 months) but completely stopped at about 10 months when he got a load of colds/teething then got enthusiastic again a month later and now demolishes everything in sight!

One thing I did was to make his tea (a large portion as I would be eating some!) put it on an adult size plate and sit on the sofa with him on one knee and the plate kind of in his lap. I think sitting in the highchair was too off-putting whereas just nicking "my" dinner was relaxed so he would eat some.

It is frustrating when other people's babies eat huge amounts and then sleep though and yours licks a breadstick and is up all night, but it is just coincidence I think, and I haven't noticed DS sleeping any better when he eats more.

Thanks - there is not much I can do about it anyway. He is teething and always has colds since starting nursery so probably doesn't feel hungry at all.

Will try feeding him out of the highchair for a change.

You know what he did today? Grabbed some food off my plate and ate some! It was a slice of Sainsbury's pizza however so not sure how that counts for healthy eating! However at this stage I would give him a kebab if it meant he would eat!

Good news! My mum keeps saying it'll be easier when DD starts eating what we're eating but that means we'll have to start eating healthier!

That's good news fifitot. Dc3 is eating a lot better but sleeping a lot worse. I think she's teething, dh thinks she's being naughty(as she grinned at him when I put the light on to check she was ok)!We had another 4 hour crying session 2 nights ago but last night I managed to rock her back to sleep in about 15mins. I've got a big packet of Hipp coming from sainsburys today and I'm starting to give up bf (that's my plan anyway).

Well the progress hasn't been sustained but it's a start.

Moo - good luck with giving up BFing! Let me know how you get on.

Dear All,

I am relieved to see I am not alone with the problems I am having weaning my 7 month daughter. After 6 weeks, she will eat porridge mixed with fruit puree for breakfast, but as a general rule will not eat the other meals. Most of the time at lunch and dinner she refuses to open her mouth, other times will eat only a few spoons. Around 10% of the time she eats a decent amount (10-15 spoons). I cannot work out a pattern though as something she has eaten well one day, she refuses the next. I think as a rule she prefers sweeter, plain smooth purees but often does not eat them. She will eat toast and try to eat finger foods sometimes.

At the start I had good intentions and made lots of Annabel Karmel purees, but they are just sat in my freezer now! I then tryed mashing up more normal foods (mash pot, spag bol, spanish omelette), which again she was inconsistent with. She did eat two jars of bought food reasonably well, so I am not sure if that is a coincidence. I think I may try giving her jars for a few days to see if she eats them better..but long term I am worried that this may not be great for getting her used to family food.

I tend to give meals just before a milk feed. I have tried afterwards and she is not at all interested, and I have tried breaking the bottle but this just upsets her.

She did have a diarrhoea virus for 2 weeks which I did think was making her not want to eat but she has been over that for a week now with no improvement in eating.

I took her to the HV to be weighed who had a go at me, telling me she needs to be eating three meals a day with protein etc. She had dropped from the 50th to 25th centile..but Dr said she had done well to put on any weight because of diarrhoea.

Any tips or suggestions? I do feel worried about it and dread meal times. But I don't want to push her too far and make things worse. It does not help that all my friends babies are eating 3 decent meals. I don't know whether I should be offering her something else when she refuses a meal..twice I thought I would see if she would eat porridge after refusing something else and she did! When I mixed the veg puree in with it she refused though!

Sorry for really long message.

What a relief to hear so many of us in the same boat.

My dd is nearly 8months and is a nightmare to feed [sheer frustration emoticon].
I can't believe how much food I've wasted since I started this weaning business. And none of this is helped by her doc telling me off either. He told me that I shouldn't give her her milk at all, only the morning and night feed, but in-between nothing but food until she finally got the picture and ate! He told me to keep it up for a week even if she kept refusing food. Of course I've completely ignored his advice.
There are so many precise guidelines for bf and ff, but when it comes to a baby's food intake there are so many contradictions out there.

At the end of the day I can only go by what my dd does and if she refuses to open her mouth to eat food then it must mean she isn't ready yet.

That was along post meep! Your hv has no right to tell you off. It is not your fault. DC3 has only just started eating even a semblance of 3 meals a day (but now teething) and is nearly 10m. Now dc1 and 2 were voracious puree gobblers and I've taken the same approach with this one but she refuses to eat anything but plain yog or mashed banana off a spoon. recently she will eat a little weetbix or pasta but dc1 was eating a whole weetabix at this age. my approch with dc3 is to work on the things she will eat with her fingers: baked potato with cheese ( she scrapes the cheesy spud of with her 2 teeth and also eats the skin!!!), quiche or tortilla and fish fingers with the crumbs removed . Then I spoon as much yog and banana down her as I can and wipe up.If she won't eat or throws it on the floor more than once I remove it. We have made progress like this and I feel she is getting at least 3 types of protein. Certainly it's become a lot easier since i gave up on the veg purees and it's been quite interesting to see that a 9m old can eat baked potato with the skin.

offmyrocker i think your dd's doc is cruel and ignorant. My wish is to see my dc eat 3 good meals a day but starving her is not the way forward, gradually the balance of milk and food will change but the guidelines from the nhs are to give your dc about a pint of milk a day (IIRC)or bf and I don't understand why a doc would ignore the guidelines.I also don't think he has thought of the issue of her becoming thirsty!!

I have the joy of a hv appointment tomorrow pm, last time I went was late november, let's hope she mananges to be positive.Dc3 is a fat little thing but was last weighed on the 75th percentile and I'm sure she's not eating enough to keep that up.

fifi have you tried the pizza again? DC3 loved it (homemade [why isn't there a smug emoticon?]) and grabbed it like she had been looking for it all her life. I've been to lazy to make it again though.

Too tired (more teething last night) to correct all my typos!!!!

so glad to find this thread. feel relieved already that my ds is not the only refuser. Currently will eat 1 weetabix at breakfast, refuses lunch but will take a petit filous around 2.30. Yesterday he took ready brek at teatime. mostly will not even entertain a dinner9 all homemade) chews on bits of toast etc but not really eating it. He's almost 10 months and BF. Loves his milkies and will wake for a feed during the night. Trying to go with him at his own pace. My 3 girls ate like wolves and slept all night at this stage. all different I suppose x

I'm glad to have found this thread too- my dd is 8 months and is ebf and eats nothing. Nothing! Perhaps a tiny bit of yoghurt will go into her mouth by mistake (when she grabs the spoon off me! Otherwise her mouth is firmly zipped shut). She might lick a rice cake, but that is it, no exaggeration.

I am slightly worried by it all!! Luckily, my hv is amazingly nice and, when I spoke to her, wasn't at all concerned by it. She said she has babies in her clinic that don't eat anything until they are a year old, and then suddenly they'll start to eat everything.

I am abit worried about her lacking in vitamins, so I've bought some abidec drops.

By the way, my dd slept through the night from 3 months (we're talking 10pm-8am here) but in the last few weeks has started waking up (I think due to some colds). So I think all babies are different!