Soupy, i agree with you about the name, i think it's pretty twee and the meaning is far too open to interpretation. i can't think what i'd call it, myself, but i find that if i say blw to friends it doesn't help them to understand what it means.
i mean, if i was to truly, truly, truly allow my daughter to wean herself without any intervention from me then she would exist on a diet of lakeland limited catalogues and dustballs. (i keep a very clean house, me).
i think it's not unlike the old formula feeding thing. loads of people assume that you can feed a child formula to your timetable, and they will eat what and when you want - but that is completely not my experience.
not only do people assume it, but they also write bestselling books about it so it must be true. i'm not being sarcastic - it really must be true that you can feed some children when they don't want to be fed. either with a bottle of formula or by shovelling mashed food into their mouths with a spoon.
not my dd though, no way. she won't have any more milk or any more broccoli than she wants, regardless of whether or not i think she should be ravenous. and i know other people who say the same thing.
perhaps it's got to do with the rise of routine-based babycare, and the fact that i have never had any sort of schedule means that my dd has always felt a measure of control over her environment... i suppose, thinking about it, the name BLW may derive from a rebellion against routine-based care as much as anything else.
As it happens, i have seen one friend give her son food on a spoon when he was, as far as i was concerned, definitely saying that he didn't want any but she was determined to see him finish his bowl of mashed banana and just plugged away until he did. that would be impossible with my dd.
so i don't know... i agree with you but i don't know what's to be done about it. Of course BLW is parent-led, but not as parent-led as some ways of spoon feeding. and the good thing about blw is that it gives you outright permission not to care about whether they eat loads or a little, because you should be assuming that they know what they are doing better than you. i do see some people really stressing about it, though, which is more of a worry, but DD eats well so far so i am fortunate in that respect.
as regards the small lumps, funnily enough dd now prefers to have a lot of her food small (borlotti beans, edamame, raisins, peas, rice) because i think it's more fun for her to pick up, now that her motor control can manage it. so if the babydragon is, what, 8 months or so, that would be consistent with my dd.
Now, you weren't the person who got snippy with me on the main board of my blog for 'implying' that all babies started eating immediately, were you? confess!