Is BLW actually safe? (*not* about choking!)

[caughtintheact]

I am currently in the early stages of BLW my DD, she's a week off 7 months and I've been having major doubts. I'm hoping people can help me work out whether my concerns are valid or just first time mum paranoia!!
So, who first said "food is just for fun until they're one"? Where does this come from? It seems to me to be extrapolated from "milk should provide the majority of a babies nutritional needs until the age of one". But- that is not saying that complementary foods are not important, just that they do not form the majority of the baby's diet...
It seems that most BLW babies (from what I've heard and read and IME) eat much less than spoon fed babies for about the first couple of months. Even though it's hopefully a relatively short time until they start feeding themselves significant amounts could it be that babies actually need adult help (i.e. spoons) to get enough food into them for this period? From the point of view of the critical vits and mins if not calories?
Also, might they actually need food to be mashed, minced or pureed to enable them to actually digest enough of it to get the goodies out?
I do realise there are lots of people on here who have done BLW and their babies haven't faded away or anything, but I was not very reassured when I found out that Gill Rapley's study was only on 5 babies...

babies don't digest a lot of stuff they eat. with blw you know this cos it is obvious in their nappies. with puree you can't tell cos its all mixed (sorry bit tmi there!) but it is there just the same. so i was to give my baby carrot puree and give him a piece of carrot i might end up seeing the piece of carrot later. i would also see the puree but not know it was there iyswim.

some babies might need vitamin supplements if bf but most won't. formula has iron etc added to it anyway.

caughtintheact - short on time - have to go get up my munchkin - I've been having some similar thoughts to you - did you reach any conclusions then???

ok. daft question maybe and hope this isn't too much of a thread hi-jack... but: when BLW purists say that it enables baby to regulate their food intake unlike puree spoon-fed babies where it is just shovelled in... i don't really get how that can be the case. We've just started our dd (5 1/2 months) on purees although were planning to just start BLW on finger foods at 6 ,months but she had other ideas. Anyway, she won't let you shovel anything in if she doesn't want it. we offer the spoon and she grabs it with both hands and shoves it in her mouth herself. and if she doesn't want it, she doesn't open her mouth or doesn't take the spoon. I guess i'm just not sure what people mean that you can 'over feed' a spoon-fed baby as my experience certainly doesn't back that up. reading the threads has given me something else to be paranoid about that i'll somehow overfeed her lol.

will go look up elsewhere re gagging... she gags if the flipping puree is too thick so i tremble at the thought of finger food but determined to try it. x

where are the purist who say that, though? i think that's pretty insulting to spoon feeding parent myself, same as i think it's pretty insulting to infer that all ff mums feed their children to a routine and don't demand feed. some don't, but that's their lookout.

as i've said a number of times (probably on this thread, lord knows, i haven't read it all) i don't think i could have spoon fed my baby a morsel more than she would have wanted. same as i couldn't have given her a millilitre more formula than she wanted. but i have seen people with my own eyes trying to make a baby finish their portion (as decided by the adult) and i have absolutely seen on MN people offering tips on handing over one spoon while 'shovelling in' the other. i don't think it's the norm, but i've seen it all the same. and talk of 'how many ice cubes is your baby eating' does happen on here, so i am thankful that BLW is more nebulous on the 'how much' question.
as for anyone else doing BLW or spoon-feeding or a mix of finger food and mash, who cares how you do it so long as everyone's happy and none of us are going to be lined up in front of twelve tubs of yoghurt on the house of tiny tearaways.

lol at the yoghurt firing line. x

jesus, though... can you imagine? that's why i love BLW, it rather gave me permission not to care too much about all that stuff.

We started by BLW initially and moved on to a combination of self-feeding and spoon-feeding because ds got very frustrated by not being able to physically get as much food as he wanted into his mouth quickly enough if left to himself! He did become very proficient at spoon-feeding himself quite quickly so we moved back to BLW but with a spoon IYSWIM!

exactly, i think blw is just self-feeding pretty much. in fact that's what i'd re-name it if i had my way cos the baby-led bit of blw gets right on people's tits.

If you think of babies around the world, through time, they have been practising BLW for ever. Eating bits of your parents' and siblings food has kept babies happy and fed for millenia.
I would just go with the (baby-led) flow and not worry about it.

I think its important to chill out and go along with whatever suits your baby best and keeps you both happy, be it blw or puree. My first dd hated purees from the start and I had an annoying hv insisting on constantly weighing her, and even doing a food diary so I could prove how much I was feeding her ! She was only 4 mo and at this point her eczeme went into overdrive and she flatly refused to eat from a spoon and would turn her head away. It broke my heart, got me so worked up and hv made me feel I was starving her ! My clever sis recommended giving her small bits of what we were eating and straight away she started picking things up and feeding herself.
dd2 however loved her purees from day one, and that too had its problems as she would not finger feed until age one, when I just refused to mash anything up anymore.
so ds1 is being experimented on in a way, as I has never heard of blw until recently, but going by my past experiences, and judgng by his behaviour, it makes perfect sense for us. He does spoon feed too, as he loved porridge for breakfast, and fromage frais too, so its a bit of both.
So like I say, its just a case of chilling out and doing what suits you.

Aitch

Ref Crohns....my cousin has Crohns and was diagnosed about 12 or so after suffering for about 4 yrs not knowing what was wrong....anyway I asked at my "First time mums" group run by my HC, on the weaning section about risk of Crohns and was it hierdiary (sp) and they say thats its not also that being introduced to certain foods isn't likely to cause it... I asked as I have asthma and food allergies.... however i have a friend who has Colearic (Sp) and this is gluten intolerance and this is buy babies being introduced to gluten pre-6months or so say... the increase of this is supposedly one of the many factors that caused the WHO to increase weaning age.... that along with children in less developed countries not having as many "health/allergy" problems and the most likely causes being all the crap in our foods

HTH

butterscotch

I did some reading about crohns a while back (earlier this year) and the "state of the art" thinking was that it's partly genetic, but also there seems to be some trigger, because some people in a family will get it and others won't.

In terms of what the triggers might be, one very likely candidate is the bowel flora in early life - ie whether the gut is vulnerable to harmful bacteria.

It's well known that solids and antibiotics alter the bowel flora in babies and change the gut's immune response to infection.

So..... while they don't know enough to say whether (or how) weaning age influences someone's risk of getting crohns, it is a theoretical possiblity.

(This is my understanding of what I read by the way - am no expert so it's fairly simplistic!)

flumpity you are doing blw but with a spoon!! she is feeding herself with the spoon you aren't shovelling it in.

unfortunately a lot of mums who do spoon feed will have these battles with baby to have one more spoonful be it singing songs, making the spoon into an aeroplane or making them laugh and quickly getting the spoon in.

I think that a mixture of approaches can work. I didn't know very much about weaning when we got there with my dd but I got a vegetarian weaning book which in hind sight advocated a fairly mixed approach between self fed finger foods and mashed up things.

Probably as long as you let the child lead the way with the quantities of what they eat and respect the fact they are allowed to dislike some things then you can't really go far wrong. My daughter always had a lot of vegetables lightly steamed and whole and pitta bread and home made finger foods of various types and then we used to giver her yoghurt and things like that on a spoon, but she always had a lot of things that we were eating, she really liked curry from well below one.

She never went through a phase of refusing to eat, but then I know that she doesn't have a huge appetite and regulates that well. She has grown into a child with quite adult tastes and quite happily has fed herself without help for a long while. She is 3 and a half now.

I'm relieved to see that so many posters are comfortable combining BLW with spoon-feeding where appropriate. I struggled at first when I tried to avoid all spoonfeeding but when I started to contemplate spreading mashed potato onto a rice cake, I knew it was getting a bit silly. These days I let him feed himself wherever possible, but when we're eating stuff that would be best eaten with cutlery, I'm happy spooning it in.

just getting this on my list

I'm trying to remember my DD at 7 months and I'm pretty sure we hadn't discovered BLW by that point, wish we had though!
We took up BLW when DD started refusing puree with lumps and I'm so glad we did, she gives everything a go and people are amazed at how well she feeds herself. Even at 18 months she doesn't have a massive appetite but I'm confident that she eats as much as she needs & is a very happy baby.
I haven't bothered getting her weighed in quite a while now as she was a small baby from the start (like me!) and she was exclusively breastfed for ages so was smaller than the charts anyway.
We did combine spoon feeding with BLW at some point as DD needed help with certain foods but now she does it all herself.
I would recommend BLW to everyone as it is really easy to do and lots of fun for everyone, it still makes me smile to see her stabbing food and shovelling it in her mouth

i had a weird experience yesterday in a restaurant... we go there a lot, the servings are HUGE so me and dd (22mos) always share a plate of penne arrabiata. oh yes, she loves her chilli.

anyhoo, she was flirting with a handsome man at the table across from us, so he came over to chat and while doing so, because she'd stopped eating (to engage with him), he started pretending to steal her food, getting right in her face about it. all that 'i'm goiing to get it before you do, oh yes i will' stuff.
dd didn't know what he was doiing, tbh, but she started eating again and smiled when he cheered when she ate.

as he walked away, he turned back and said, 'i know what it's like, i've got a 2 and a half year old son. your dd was struggling there but i've persuaded her to finish that lot.'

we were like 'oh yes, thanks, that's wonderful, great, bye bye, say bye bye to the nice man, dd' etc but dd yelled 'more pasta NOW mummy' and then said 'bye bye man'. it was weird, he walked away thinking he'd done us a great favour and we were just thinking 'could you get your hands off my dd's dinner, please?' perhaps he was drunk.

and cheers, butterscotch, for the info. my pal is a pretty major figure in the Crohns world (what a great thing for her, i know she'd rather not be) and she more goes along with the welliemum 'inherited sensitivity to triggers' line. i've also seen welliemum post about the gut being a bit overwhelmed by foreign substances if things don't progress slowly in the beginning, and that also chimes for me. although having said that, at 6 months dd threw herself at food...

I've been doing BLW for about a month now, DS is coming up to 27 weeks. He must have the equivalent of half a vegetable stick at each meal. I've been feeling guilty for not feeling guilty iyswim, and wondering if I should be worried that he eats so little.
I only give him one meal a day, and if I'm honest that is pure laziness from not wanting to clean the highchair more than once a day, plus, because we, as a family, usually only have one 'meal' a day, breakfast and lunch are eaten as and when, on a night we sit together and eat a proper meal, and we include DS in this.
He usually tries most things I give him, and I'm trying to make the effort to give him as much variety as possible, even if it just involves chewing it then spitting it out. I'm trying not to be held back by the fact I don't like things.
I console myself by the fact that this is BLW so if he needed to eat more, he would! His milk feeds haven't gone down noticably so I'm happy he's not going to starve, and although he's small, he is growing and developing fine.
Should I be worried? Although DH makes exaggerated eating noises and cheers when he eats, I don't really encourage or help him other than making sure the food is within his reach.
Sorry this is a bit garbled but I've been wondering about this for a while.

nah, i wouldn't be worried at all. but i do remember feeling very lax about it in the beginning, like i wasn't worried enough, iykwim? maybe it's just our personality types? [slack]

uberalice you can just put mashed potato on their highchair try and they can eat it with their hands. the only thing that we have to use a spoon for is yoghurt.

I think lax is good, helps them develop a relaxed attitude to food, rather than an emotional one.

I've seen the BLW work really well on children who do not take to spoon feeding...but, most babies brought up through the ages have been fed some sort of mashed (if not necessarily pureed food) - i.e. mums in many non-western cultures and in the past would chew the food in their mouth before offering it to their babies.

In Europe from the middle-ages pulp (i.e. solids) was often started much earlier than the 6 months that is (for the last 2 years) recommended...interestingly, I've read that Gill Rapley actually recommends introducing pureed food between 4-6 months - as there have been several pieces of research to show that intake of veg (particularly tart ones i.e. broccoli, brussels sprouts (yes, really) rather than sweet veg has been shown to lead to children who like their veg. I guess it's all about introducing as many types of flavours and textures as possible ...

I'm going for a mixed approach as well...I tend to give the protein meal lunchtime followed by finger foods + mashed food (my 6.5 month old loves feeding himself mashed food - very messy) at tea time...

But really, I guess whatever suits you and your personality will work as long as you are relaxed about the mess and don't keep on wiping the baby's face/fingers etc whilst s/he is eating.

haha i don't even wipe after he's eaten!!

Swede, having done a fair amount of study on food and medicine in the middle ages, I'd be inclined to go against much of what was the norm then...