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?? :)

The two things (reading parenting books and following one's instinct) are not mutually exclusive, surely? I have done both.

Interesting to read everyones views. I still think that the pureed way makes the most sense although clearly each baby is different and there will be exceptions to this (like the person whose baby stole the sandwich!). Blw carries the risk of choking, there has not been any proper research done on it so all the claims of puree=overeater/fussy eater and blw=unfussy eater (or anchovy botherer as someone else said) are totally unfounded.

NormanTebbit I never puree anything myself either I use jars/pouches - v funny about the baby led toilet training - that might be the next craze, lets hope not!

it's just that you have no idea how precious or otherwise parents are in the amazonian rainforests... but the continuum concept book says that the south american indians have very definite ideas about how to raise their young 'uns. i hardly need add that they don't have blenders.

Seems like a fad to me. Spoon feeding has worked for generations, but BLW will work for some, like with any technique.

Right, taking this pregnancy hormone riddled body off to bed now. I'll get back to you Aitch.

agree aitch. How do we know the amazonian rainforest dwellers don't overanalyse with the best of us? (patronising to assume they don't imo)

i think it is highly unlikely, actually impossible, mcphee, that no-one in your family or extended family will have read a book on parenting at any time and been influenced by it and gone on to influence others.

the 'instinct' thing is interesting too. there was a great paper linked to here once, that covered some western docs working out in india trying to persuade women to wean their children 'early'.

in that particular locale, you see, those women's instincts told them that their children should have breastmilk and only breastmilk until they were two years old and older, and as a result their kids were becoming anaemic.

in truth, their 'instincts' were a construct of what they had learned from their peers and parents, possibly something to do with some contraceptive belief, but those women would have sworn blind that they were only following their 'instincts'. there's really no such thing. it's all learned behaviour and response, what is natural to one mother is batshit crazy to another. or even, in this case, demonstrably damaging to the children.

purees aren't new. babies were fed milk, then milky 'pap' which was basically thin porridge, gradually going on to 'soupy' mashed veg and then meat, chewed up by parent first. the enzymes in saliva partially breaking down the meat so it could be eaten by the baby.

Babies would have been taught how to use cutlery by first being given a sporky sort of spoon thing and a thing called a Shoveller. and not used fingers (in well-brought up households) at all!

I'm that old!

The local breastfeeding counsellor at my sure start centre told us that BLW was done in the stone age and that if we didn't Blw we would damage our babies development. That kind of attitude and the 'blw recipes' making it as much of a faff as Anabel Karmel (why not just spoon in porridge rather than making porridge fingers?) is I think why there is now a minor backlash.

I also hear that Blw is great if you are lazy. So is CBeebies, but interacting with your child less is not necessarily a good thing.

Oh dear, my last post was missing an exclamation mark at the end.

again, this 'has worked' thing is interesting. (leaving aside the generations and generations and generations of weaning that must have taken place before the ready availability of spoons. there was some maternal chewing and spitting a la mama birds but god knows that can't have gone on for a long period. blerk)

has puree-feeding (so we are really talking recently, here, not my great-granny giving her kids a lamb bone to chew on) worked? how so? what research has been done into it? granted there is an assumption that it does work, but what are the criteria? is it our immensely slim, healthy population? so much is said about the lack of research into BLW but in actual fact more has been done on BLW than has ever been done on puree-feeding as a 'method', and more continues to be done.

i'm not saying it hasn't 'worked', btw, i'm just curious as to what the criteria are. how do you prove a method as 'working'? how do you define whether is is working well or not?

or is it possible that we 'know' it works because we see each other on the street and we are all alive? same as the indian mothers who 'know' that the time to introduce solids is two or above? isn't it just whatever is most prevalent in society being assumed to work, without having actually been tested in any fashion.

(btw am SO not sayign blw is best here, i don't give a damn about that, am just asking for details as to how puree etc 'works' )

Tangentially, plenty of people read, and in English, in the middle ages, including women. Recipes and advice on food, medicine and nursing were collected, and it's likely that the contents of a book would have been shared orally with non-literate members of a community.

As you were.

You're spot on ilovemountains Its a healthy backlash. Debate like this give more opportunity for people to make their own minds up, by having lots of evidence on both sides.

I looked for research into puree feeding, and found nothing. It's not been terribly high in funding council priorities, as far as I can see.

This is quite a discussion.

I've done a bit of both. I have to say I think purees and mush have a lot to recommend them as a transitional stage from milk to proper food - it seems like quite a good system if you can stand the mess. I don't recognise this picture of forcing spoons into babies' mouths at all - both of mine grabbed the spoon off me from day 1 and probably had more control over the whole process than me. But they both started on finger foods from early on too.

Regarding the idea that pureeing is a relatively modern phenomenon, is it not the case that women used to - and in some places still do - pre-chew food for their babies and feed it to them mouth to mouth? Surely this is essentially pureeing?

The criteria is whether the babies become malnourished or not on purees. There is loads of research on this on the WHO website under 'Nutrition'. As a result of this the WHO have recommendations (again on their website) for when, how and how much to feed babies in both developed and developing countries.

...and "babies" in historical weaning evidence would have been aged two years and over.

(I've no preference over which method anyone chooses to get food into their child)

agreed, 101, perhaps our instincts should tell us to go back to doing that, then? is everyone up for that? will we all start chewing our kids' food and spitting it into their mouths? are we agreed that is the most natural way? instinct tells me so.

i really cannot see that the chewing thing would have lasted any time beyond six months, btw. what's the point when they can chew themselves? the 6 months thing is a whole 'nuther debate, of course, but if we accept that it's the time to wean then it does give us the opportunity to throw out a lot of unnecessary weaning practices. i was weaned from two weeks (! and have the IBS and kidney damage to show for it) but by six months was totally self-feeding, just like every other puree-fed kid my mother knew. so you have to take the timings into account as well because, broadly speaking, you can't blw much before six months.

I did see the logic, zeph, but most mammals don't seem to do this, do they? I don't buy the historical argument as it's pretty difficult to properly establish evidence for this kind of thing. But I don't recall ever seeing anything indicating that parent mammals chew up food for offspring - think that wd be more telling. Mine had no problem going straight to solid food, some would hate it, I guess.

Sorry, my last post was specifically for Aitch.

Zeph - tis true, I posted as much above (@23:05)

that cbeebies crack is a bit uncalled-for, don't you think? we're tryign to have a discussion here, it's potentially really interesting, i think.

101 i don't know what you mean about the two year olds, could you elaborate? i'm not sure who you're replying to.

habbibu (hello by the way - haven't seen you on here for ages), I did think that too, but then non-human mammals are born more physically developed than us, aren't they, so there is all sorts of caregiving that humans do which other mammals have no need for.

If people are finding this thread useful, I might point out that research has been carried out (and accepted by the creator of the Blw tag) that blw could be unsuitable for around six percent of babies, mainly due to hand-mouth dexterity. Can't work out how to link on this phone, but a link to the research is on the Wikipedia entry for blw.