Am I the only one who thinks baby led weaning is a stupid idea?

[chocablock]

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/mar/14/familyandrelationships

It seems as if everyone is doing BLW apart from me. What happened to the tried and tested traditional mashing up your baby's food and feeding it to them with a spoon? OK maybe let them play around with their own spoon a bit to get into practise but basically make sure they eat the food!!!Is there anyone else who thinks blw is new fangled stupidity? Or am I just a voice in the wildreness and hopelessly old fashioned?? :)

It's a twee little term that makes me teeth ache, much in the same way that 'play date' does

Just because you puree/mash and chuck the odd bit of finger food at your child does not mean you are force feeding it - but I think the idea suits a particular agenda.

onefatcat find it strange that you would identify someone by the way they feed their babies as in "BLWers" and secondly how do you know what the people who choose to feed their babies in this way think of parents that choose to spoon feed? Can you read minds?

If you read the BLW threads Jilted there are those who believe that babies who are spoon fed are force fed.

stop trying to create a fight where there is none, OP. precious parenting can be irritating, yes, but guess what, some people just are a bit more anxious than others.

BLW has nothing to do with precious parenting, it's just weaning and food. people get equally if not more wound up by Annabel Karmel etc than just leaving kids to eat finger food while they're learning how to eat.

fwiw i run a BLW website, i really liked doing it with both my girls (insofar as there was very little to actually 'do' iyswim and i always got my own dinner hot) but had they not taken to it i'd just have done something else. that's because i'm not easily wound up about parenting stuff, i take it all in my stride. but not everyone is like that, and a bit of 'preciousness' is better than not caring at all imo.

i've never seen blwers assume that all puree fed babies are being force fed, btw, onefatcat, i think that would be a hurtful and untrue assertion were it being made. children and parents behaviour exists on a spectrum, that's why there's no point in being dogmatic about 'methods'. i guess what you may be misinterpreting is the fact that if you are letting the child pick up and eat the food by themselves, there really cannot be any force feeding, it's impossible, whereas if you are of a mind to make your kids eat more off their spoons, you can employ various distraction 'tricks'. (plane landing, train going through tunnel etc etc). but it does not follow, of course, that everyone does that. that would be a ridiculous statement.

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Both my big two had a mixture of mush and finger food. Can I just say ha ha ha ha to the very idea of baby being forced to eat something they don't want because it's on a spoon. All they do is clamp their mouth shut and/or spit it out. Dd did a particularly good line in spraying me with food by blowing raspberries when she had enough. She thought it was hilarious . Finger food meant the dog got fat.

"how do you know what the people who choose to feed their babies in this way think of parents that choose to spoon feed? Can you read minds?"

No, I can read words.

can you link to those posts, maisie? i don't follow the blw threads on here any more, but would be most surprised to read that on here. (because it's clearly bollocks and the MN bollocks-o-meter is generally quite sensitive regardless of the subject).

Well if that is true it is a very silly point of view. We did purees with DS and in no way force fed him, he was like a little cuckoo with his mouth open waiting for the spoon and would still let me feed him at 7.5 if I was daft enough to do it. DD in no way shape or form would have a spoon.

We did what we always do, we read up on it and then did what suits us.

"I hated the idea of forcing food into a baby's mouth with a spoon irrespective of whether or not they were hungry. No wonder most of us as adults have no idea how to self-regulate our food intake - we are taught from weaning to eat what is put in front of you, not what you actually feel like eating."

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YABU.

Would you argue that BF was tried and tested so why FF?

Why use disposable nappies when terries are tried and tested?

Why follow attachment parenting rather than SWMNBN?

It's a choice and no more stupid than any other choice parents make regarding what they think is best for their child.

Bloody hell, the wheel was new fangled stupidity once, but it turned out to be quite practical didn't it? Besides, what did people do before the spoon was invented - starve their children?

oh and it is Most Definitely a wanky name. not meaningless, i think, but actively open to misinterpretation. i think Self-Feeding would have been better, but when Gill Rapley wrote her initial paper on 'letting babies self-feed' i don't imagine she thought it would become a 'thing'.

"Yes, it's much better to force feed your baby the same textured food so they have no control over what's in there body, struggle to deal with textures and strong flavours later and turn it to fussy eaters!"

There are two examples for you just from this thread.

And a few crappy mis posts where I clicked the wrong thing!

We BLW and we don't think that so it's not true. Maybe a few people might have that opinion but they will probably be in a minority and I've never seen a post on MN that says spoon feeding is force feeding, well apart from Norman's example of force feeding.

where did you get that quote from, soupy? could you link?

fwiw i hate the idea of food being forced into a baby's mouth irrespective of whether they want it too. don't you?

i think this illustrates the point i was making. there is nothing in that comment that says that all parents who puree feed are force feeding, yet presumably you are interpreting it that way?

and i was also taught to clean my plate and still do to this day, a big part of letting my two control their appetites (they can leave cake if they are full, hallelujah, whereas i find that Physically Impossible) was to do with my not wanting to repeat that with my two. would i have repeated it if i had puree-fed? presumably not, but why not start off like i meant to go on? it causes no-one any harm, does it?

Ok so you've got me with that example but it is wrong to assume that all parents who BLW feel that way.

I blw as it made sense to me. DD ate what I was having from the off. It wasn't a fad or something I whipped out as a sign of my preciousness. And until they dig up a prehistoric woman clutching a blender and some ice cube trays, I'm going to assume it's not a new thing at all.

But I have no particular opinion about people who choose to do purees at a time a child is developmentally ready. I don't much like the videoes on YouTube of tiny, prostrate babies being spoonfed mush which they try to push back out again, only to have it pushed back in and I wasn't too keen on watching sil spoon mush into dn as she lay on a beanbag. But that's nowt to do with purees and everything to do with going against developmental readiness.

Of course it's not stupid. Taking sides for or against a way of handing food to your baby is stupid.

I did BLW weaning with my son and it hasn't worked out well. I put 4 or 5 foods on his plate and let him help himself to whatever he likes. The outcome now (2 years later) is he still won't eat anything with a sauce (eg cottage pie) and won't eat pasta and rice. He only ate the things he wanted to (fruit, cheese, sweetcorn, oatcakes etc) and won't try anything hot other than fish fingers, sausages and the usual junk food. I'm worried about him and wish I had given him more stews, chicken/gravy dishes to introduce "sloppy foods" to him earlier. If anyone has any advice it would be really appreciated. Thanks x

oh i see it now, thanks. yeah... well that's not the norm imo and ime. i guess her comment is just responding directly to the OP calling it stupid etc? which was pretty insulting.

but i'd say that most of us (weaners, formula or bottle feeders, buggy pushers or sling people, or parents who just make everything up as they go along) are just trying to get through, don't give a shit what anyone else does and just want to do what we're doing without being insulted or mocked. not too much to ask, i think?

What on earth is SWMNBN?

Yes that spoon feeding scene was not a good one

Alexmummy, it might not be anything to do with blw. Could be myriad reasons why your child is fussy. Please don't automatically assume you caused it due to a single decision. Have you searched the archives on here? Perhaps start a thread?

DD ate whatever we ate at the beginning. I think that was the selling point for me with blw. There was no waiting to introduce things. She had cottage pie in the first week iirc, as well as stew, spaghetti bolognese and roast dinner.

Alex I don't think that his fussiness is anything to do with BLW and everything to do with been offered a limited diet. If you do BLW there is no reason not offer foods with sauces right from the off.

If he is 2.5 I would be tempted to give him milk in the morning followed by or with breakfast, a midmorning snack, lunch of something he likes, mid afternoon snack and tea of whatever you are eating, like spag bol or korma, fish pie etc followed by a pudding and milk at bedtime. Don't worry if he doesn't eat his tea, praise him if he does and ignore any tantrums. He should get enough from everything else he eats.

did you never offer him stews in the past, alexmom? or did he refuse them? some kids certainly go through stages of wanting their food 'separate', mine both did at around 2... i believe it might be somethign to do with development and them going out of the 'cave' and needing to identify poisons, something like that anyway. both went back to having their food mixed up after a while, but then they had been used to them prior, i guess. what kind of foods do you like eating?

Alex

I have one fussy eater and it helps a little to put things like chicken inside a wrap so she can't see it, she also likes dipping carrots in homous and toast soldiers in egg. Also steak cut into thin strips to dip in ketchup is a favourite.

I have also spread cottage pie on toast