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Weaning

Find weaning advice from other Mumsnetters on our Weaning forum. Use our child development calendar for more information.

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

388 replies

chocablock · 11/11/2011 10:30

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?? :)

OP posts:
Sidge · 12/11/2011 22:19

Not helped that many parents think gagging is choking. Big difference.

Puree with lumps in can be harder for some babies to manage as well, because they slurp the puree (because it's liquid-y) and then come across a lump and don't know what to do with it. That's when they gag or retch.

AitchTwoOh · 12/11/2011 22:47

very true, habs. some people love nothing more than a blended soup but i wouldn't call them smug eejits for it. Grin

sidge, i always remember the person who first told me about BLW (she'd read about it in a mag) saying in the end that she'd decided not to do it cos she was scared of the choking thing. fair enough, i said, so what will you do if she chokes on something else, and of course she had to say she had no fucking idea. we posl. Grin

ChippingInNeedsSleep · 13/11/2011 03:40

Unless you spoon feed them until they leave home, at some stage you are going to have to deal with the mess, might as well be sooner than later.

For us neat & control freaks any kind of feeding takes teeth grinding to a new level Grin

Really, you just need an easy clean highchair & floors and it's not too bad.

Oh that... and choosing wisely when you eat out Grin

NormanTebbit · 13/11/2011 08:55

I don't get rice cakes. They taste vile. They have no nutritional value. They are bleedin expensive.

Mine used to get rich tea fingers.

lilham · 13/11/2011 10:18

NormanTebbit why do you think hungry babies need solids? My 7mo DD is sick atm in hospital. The paeds banned solids for her. She's put on a pure milk diet because it's better for her body, and helps her recover faster. Oh and she's not in for a digestive disease. It's a respiritory one.

I think it's more a myth baby actually needs solid to their tums at this age.

NormanTebbit · 13/11/2011 10:51

Sorry to hear your dd is in hospital. She is on a milk diet because it is medically indicated.

Babies need solid food to support their nutritional and developmental needs. But everyone is different. What concerns me is that parents may stick dogmatically to the notion of BLW when child does not have the co ordination to eat the amount of solid food it wants to.

NormanTebbit · 13/11/2011 11:05

But that said, I weaned DD1 when it was all pear and parsnip purées at 4 months and I found the philosophy of BLW liberating in some respects. I liked the fact it didn't pathologise food. Dd3 is the best eater of the three, she had mashed up stews, chocolate buttons, fruit, broccoli, potato scones, lentil Dahl, spag Bol, quesadillas from an early age. Very early. And has a very healthy take it or leave it relationship with food.

NormanTebbit · 13/11/2011 11:07

That's not to say if you have a fussy child it's your fault. It's not.

HalleysWaitress · 13/11/2011 11:25

having glanced at AK - expensive and pretentious baby food - gruyere cheese ffs. blw - no extra work/shopping required.

i dreaded weaning by puree from when i was pregnant with dd - the idea still makes me gag. saw article on blw in that pile of shit mother and baby mag of all things - instantly liberated he he. dd happy - HW happy

i only take issue with early weaning and weaning when the baby is too small for a highchair and they are being spoon fed rusks in a bouncer. yuck. and jars - people call blw lazy - not as lazy as jars - at least blw is real food!

sleepywombat · 13/11/2011 11:25

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

NormanTebbit · 13/11/2011 12:31

Oh jars are very useful sometimes

BertieBotts · 13/11/2011 12:58

But that's nonsense, because when they first start having food they don't realise that it fills them up.

DS barely ate until 22 months. Nothing I could do would persuade him. He existed mainly on breastmilk until then when he suddenly decided he did want to eat, and he's perfectly healthy and a normal size. So I really don't think that an extra few weeks while they get the hang of eating BLW style makes much difference to their nutritional intake.

AitchTwoOh · 13/11/2011 13:46

i don't think anyone on MN is really into dogma, though, are they? and the babies who are 'at risk' are 6%, so what percentage of those particular babies are going to have parents who are sufficiently dogmatic not to help their kids along?

the study had to have a very 'pure' understanding of BLW, the individual parent (unless they are a bit freaky, and there is always a small percentage of freaky parents regardless of how they wean their kids) does not, thank goodness. i mean, i don't think anyone would be daft enough to hold puree-weaning up as some sort of foolproof system guaranteeing perfect future health, would they? (cos the tv companies never seem to have any trouble finding those five-year-olds on fifteen frubes a day). Grin

issynoko · 13/11/2011 17:54

Aitch and Maisie. Medieval kind of meant any old time in history when general survival was more important. I know all kinds of theories about the best for children from, roughly, Victorian times onwards, but generally I think people had so little choice that worrying about whether you offered your baby some kind of mush or thought and argued about whether it should be given as a baked rusk to suck for itself was much less important than making sure your family had food, warmth and avoided the plague. We can sit and debate this online because we are enormously fortunate to live in times where BF, BLW, jars, purees etc are all available. But still all that really matters is...is the baby happy and healthy and is the mum relaxed or driving herself nuts worrying about stuff that isn't that important.

And yes - most Medieval women would not be reading unless they were aristocrats (with wet nurses and kitchen staff etc ) or the Abbess of an order of nuns. So BLW unlikely to be top of the list for either of those groups.

Maisiethemorningsidecat · 13/11/2011 18:39

Agree Issy.

AitchTwoOh · 13/11/2011 18:40

i think tbh the thread has discussed that and that you may be incorrect in your assumptions. agree however that local abbess unlikely to be interested in weaning of any description.

AitchTwoOh · 13/11/2011 18:41

and habbibu afaia a medieval historian.

Maisiethemorningsidecat · 13/11/2011 18:41

Or you may not be incorrect

AitchTwoOh · 13/11/2011 19:42

lol, well of course.

chocablock · 13/11/2011 23:17

Just checked to see where this thread had got to and interested to see the discussion has moved on to medieval history and the likelihood that the local abbess would be interested in blw!! :)

lilham really sorry your baby is sick. Hope she gets better very very soon.

I do take the point that many people have made that as long as your baby is happy and well fed it doesn't matter whether you puree or do blw. I guess I feel as if the blw is being pushed as the new 'latest craze' and I still think that even in the olden days mothers would have chewed up whatever they were eating into a puree and fed it to their baby and wouldn't as a rule have let them grab large chunks of food. However as I am not so old as to have been around in those olden days then I of course don't know for sure!

OP posts:
sleepywombat · 14/11/2011 03:50

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

AitchTwoOh · 14/11/2011 10:32

i'll never understand the burden that BLW has to be suitable for all babies, though. is puree suitable for all babies? demonstrably not.

there really is, as you discovered, a biiiiig window of opportunity for what children can do, and for what parents can tolerate. i personally think that BLW, as an approach, is a great deal more flexible than the AK meal-planner, and would always advise people who want to spoon feed as well to do so.
because they are the parents, and if they want to, they probably want to for good reason. a book doesn't know your kid, a 'method' has never met your baby. but starting off with the idea that you will let your child do as much as he or she is physically capable of is pretty sensible, i personally think.

habbibu · 14/11/2011 12:07

Ha! Just did a bit of scouting about, on the assumption that there must be a fair amount of research on child feeding/weaning in the middle ages. Turns out so far that they may have got it Very Wrong... Can't copy the thing, but a bioarchaeology study says that they weaned onto "pap" - flour and bread cooked in water (which is making me queasy) and panada - flour or cereal in a broth with butter or milk. So much like puree in texture. She suggests that the high cereal content of the pap prob interfered with zinc absorption, and that medieval writers associated weaning with disease such as rickets, gastrointestinal disease and growth retardation. Mean weaning age before 17th and 18th centuries was 18 months, however, so it's kind of moot; I don't think most of us wd think that a child with no eating problems should be eating the equivalent of pap at 18mo.

Fascinating as all this is, I don't really think it aids discussion about modern weaning practice; I would not have wanted to be around in the middle ages, tbh. I've seen enough of how their medicine worked.

fwiw, though, the women reading thing isn't so simple. Private reading is a relatively modern phenomenon, and in the earlier middle ages writing was more of a menial skill - one dictated to a secretary (amanuensis) rather than using your own hands. In the later middle ages many middle class women would have had some reading skills in the vernacular, but access to literacy didn't mean having to read yourself, iyswim - if a household or a village had books, people would receive the information orally, so women would have had access to written literature, even if they couldn't read it themselves.

Not a medieval historian per se, but i was a medievalist who specialised in vernacular literacy (from the language side) hence the pointless digression.

ZephirineDrouhin · 14/11/2011 12:47

Nutritionally inadequate pap is still a big problem in many parts of the world (according to my studies at the University of Google). This really very interesting article suggests a more positive attitude towards the widespread practice of maternal pre-chewing - which they believe may confer immunological benefits as well as making a greater range of nutrients available to the infant - may be a solution.

Commenting on the problem of revulsion towards the practice in industrialised societies they suggest that:

"The aversion with which many people today regard the very thought of premastication is similar to the negative views of breastfeeding that characterized many people?s view of breastfeeding until recently. Fortunately, as research has demonstrated the benefits of breastfeeding, and as these benefits have become widely understood and accepted, negative attitudes about breastfeeding have largely disappeared."

I'm almost starting to feel guilty about not doing it.

NormanTebbit · 14/11/2011 13:05

Habbibu - it's a very interesting digression