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?? :)

Plenty of spoon fed children are fed whilst the parent does something else - listens to an older child read, watches the tv, talks to other people - it's not always this warm fuzzy bonding moment. Even when it's all you are doing it's not usually a warm fuzzy bonding moment!! More of an attempt to get the content of the bowl into the baby without it landing on the cat - a lot like BLW.

DS3 BLW'd himself at 17 weeks old (!) by grabbing carrots off my plate and shovelling them in his mouth while I was distracted by one of the older dc. I hoiked out as many as I could, but he had definately swallowed some. I spoke to the HV the next day - and she said if he was grabbing food and eating it, he was ready to be weaned. So I carried on letting him steal off my plate for about a week, and then just dished him up whatever we were eating. It helps that I don't use salt in my cooking anyway as we have kidney probs in the family.

I do interact with my BLW dc at mealtimes - why just tonight I was having a lovely conversaton with 9mo DS3 about how my ear was not a suitable storage place for his peas...after the third time he tried to shove one in there. . We all sit at the table together.

Ear convo sounds great HuntyCAt

Been ruminating over the blw thing during the night. (after I had to wake myself from a nightmare involving Jay Mckray, ugh)

I reckon blw has become popular because we have an abundance of food these days.
What do you think?

In times past, food wastage would have been greatly discouraged, there was likely not quite enough to go round in the first place and there is a lot of wastage in BLW, it goes on the floor, in ears, dog's mouths and simply discarded.
Perhaps also that babies are able to choose what they eat and don't eat (is this a good or bad thing? are babies able to make 'right' choices? - whole nuther topic!) creates wastage.

Maybe the abundance of carb-heavy cheap food and the encouragement to choose (rather than 'eat your greens, eat what you're given' attitude ) has something to do with poor dietary choices that have created this generations unhealthy attitude towards food?
As well, of course, of the decline of home-made food and mass marketing of over- processed baby food.

It all leads me to be very sceptical to the belief that babies have been BLW since "The stone age".

Again, I'm not 'for' or 'against' BLW. Whatever works IMO.

I just find it an interesting topic.

Ok, me head is cleared out now

You can pick stuff up from the floor, if it's clean. And I tended to eat DS' leftovers. I probably wouldn't if it was pureed. So I don't know that there is more wastage one way or the other TBH.

have you ever weaned a child this way, 101, you seem so certain of how it works. fwiw i can't really abide waste, and wouldn't say that my children were any more wasteful than puree-fed kids. after all, everyone's saying that they obeyed their children's signals, aren't they? so they couldn't have ate the same one cube or whatever at every meal, there must have been leftover puree. (and one wouldn't dish that up again and again, presumably, given that it would have been degrading across every atom of its cut surface area - that being the point of giving it in an effectively pre-masticated form).

again, the stone age not my area of speciality but i imagine that meals were eaten communally, in longhouses or somesuch, so wasteage wouldn't have been a big problem, one would have taken what one needed for one's child. so long as you don't overwhelm children with food, imo and ime, they eat it. and if they drop it, because their motor skills are just getting the hang of things, you just pick it up and offer it again. in stone age, one presumes this would merely have been a matter of grabbing it off one's maternal lap, the ikea antilop having not yet been invented.

nowadays, however, i wholeheartedly agree that part of the appeal is that we live in a massively over-abundant society and the skill of knowing when we are full and stopping eating is imo a necessary one. (it's one i absolutely Do Not Have, unfortunately, as one of the 'clear your plate' generation ).

I think the research shows that BLW babies are more likely to join in family mealtimes than those spoon fed...which would suggest the interaction is there just different.

Parents who BLW generally sit with their babies anyway - it's not as if they get left alone! There is a difference between control and interaction.

I can confirm that there is a great deal of waste involved with purees in this house. Premastication certainly the least wasteful weaning method.

It's apparently very widespread outside the West.

I don't know why stone age = good. Can someone tell me?

not i, Norm.

I think the idea is that before the development of agriculture there was a good fit between our dietary habits and what/how we had evolved to eat. With agriculture came significant dietary innovations (eg a great deal more wheat and dairy) that we have not evolved to cope with, hence the prevalence of diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke etc

Not sure how this relates to weaning methods though.

Or we had more food?

Yes, more calories generally

at last someone has said (op) what I have been thinking for ages!!

My sil summed it up perfectly when she pointed out her eldest son who was weaned the normal way of eating a wide variety of mushed up food and finger food will eat anything whereas her youngest who was blw is as fussy as they get because in reality you are fairly limited as to what you can give them.

Also I remain unconvinced that it is not a huge risk in terms of choking - there I have said it!!!

No, OP you are not the only one. I am vintage, purée and spoon and a bread stick as finger food. Can't be arsed with the mess BLW generates. I guess seeing my SIL doing it with my nephew scarred me for life, more food on the floor and walls than in mouth. But hey whatever works for anyone!

If it was a huge risk in terms of choking, then you would have seen numbers of choking incidents rising hugely over the last few years as BLW has gained popularity.

BLW actually helps against choking, in all likelihood, because it teaches them to chew before they learn to swallow. Purees teach them to swallow before they learn to chew.

You're not limited in what you give them at all. Maybe she was doing it wrong.

i do think that if you are a neat freak/control freak then it's not for you, definitely, but that doesn't make it a 'new-fangled stupidity'.

and it's just utter rubbish that you are fairly limited in what you can give, really, so that speaks more to your sil's cooking than anything else. certainly if you follow AK there is no question that your child will be eating a very varied diet from a very early age. (to be fair to AK, i think she represented a genuine leap forward from the packet rice/grain mush/jar weaning that was popular when she started.)

re: choking. no wish to call down the gods here but i have over 6000 members on my site (nothing to here, of course) and it's been going for five years, with well over 300,000 posts. afaia, not one reporting a choke that required anything like a blue-light to a hospital. and tbh it's the sort of place a furious parent would post.

i also have friends/family who work in A&E (two paramedics, one paed consultant), with careers adding up to fifty years on the casualty scene... not one can recall a choking fatality on their block.

has anyone ever seen anything on here? i remember one post where a puree-weaned one year old (or so) had a bad choke on some finger food, so i'm not saying that chokes don't happen... just that a particular weaning method is no insurance. after all, by what, nine months, surely puree-weaned babies are onto finger food anyway?

i am always baffled by the strength of feeling over what cannot be more than three months in a kids' life, where one has mush and the other has solid food...

Yes, how exactly are you limited in what you give them? And two children in the same family being different kinds of eaters means nothing - my sister's two were both puree fed - both decent eaters, but wee one fussier for much longer than the first. My two both BLW, also both decent eaters, but wee one more picky than the first (who would actually eat absolutely anything, except peanut butter). Therefore I decree that second children are ALWAYS more fussy.

my second is more fussy too, or at least i thought she was, it actually took me a long time to realise that she just doesn't like the same food as her sister. dd1 is her father's daughter and prefers meat and two veg, dd2 is my kid and loves bowlful after bowlful of spicy harissa ratatouille. who'da thunk it?

thank god for pasta and stews etc, where we all agree.

youngest who was blw is as fussy as they get because in reality you are fairly limited as to what you can give them.

eh?? How? DS has exactly what we eat, every meal - he is 6 mo old.....

How is it limited?

Yes, ds prefers stuff all mixed up, but he'll still pick out stuff he's not so keen on, sometimes, other times he'll just shovel everything in. I can see it changing slowly - he's asking for stuff like carrot (and then mincing it with his teeth before deciding he can't be arsed to swallow) yet he's got a pretty broad palate, so I think he's just v normal for a toddler, and dd was odd, in a good way.

I don't think it's the best way for all parents and all children - I do know it suited us really well, and it's nice that there are options to try out, just as there are for sleep, travel, etc - I just don't get the vitriol.

me neither. it's SUCH a short time as well. the govt literature says 'give them finger foods as soon as they can manage them', so the only difference is that some parents (blwing ones) are just 'not spooning' for the most part. it's hardly an abuse.

Actually, bread sticks and rice cakes spooked me more than the other stuff mine were eating, as they seemed more prone to snap and be chokable than many of our dinners - however, on the same principle as discussed above, I decided that was prob irrational, as most babies have them and hardly any choke.

I do have sympathy for those who recoil from the mess - although I reckon puree can also be messy, BLW is not ever really a tidy business, though waste I think depends very much on the child, as with puree. I recoil from puree and funny mixes like parsnip and apple - that doesn't, however, make it legitimate for me to call it a stupid idea.