Can we clear up once and for all whether you are 'allowed' to mention the possibility of spoon feeding on a BLW thread?

[Enid]

If the consensus is no, then I will happily bow out of any thread asking for advice on weaning, specifically BLW.

I always say that IMO it is fine to do both - ie a mixture of finger foods and spoon feeding.

Surely this cannot be in any way controversial?

Well, I'm as clear as mud on all that! Thankfully all three of mine are weaned...

yes enid you are soo right

I asked this very question a while back.

I have resolved to steer clear of the semantics surrounding BLW. I don't get the big deal about giving some of the messier foods on a spoon (don't shoot me - please )

I give a mixture of finger foods and other things I give with spoon. I do not give purees or jars though. So for those of us in the middle, there is seemingly, no term/name/acronym.

I'd go for 'Shared weaning' to describe what I do with dd, Idris.

Argh, we are all trying to do the best for our children.

The only reason I get a bit irritated with the slightly rigid BLW thing (and I have not having a dig, Aitch, you and your blog have been completely invaluable) is we are all basing this on ONE Gill Rapley article. If we were to get hold of her, and she said "yep, hold a spoon in front of them, if they take it that's OK", would we then include that in the BLW pantheon?

thank you enid!

I don't get why you need all these labels anyways - it crosses everything that parents do from 'baby wearers' to 'attatchment parenting'.......just do what you do, you don't have to give it a special name

dejags

perhaps it's just a meal/food

of course a lot of animals chew their food for their young or regurgitate it which is an alternative to mashing or pureeing the big bits

but 'shared weaning' is really just what most people who wait til 6 months do isn't it? so that's just Weaning, in effect.

i think the only reason i care about the misapprehension is that there isn't a lot of info out there on BLW so many people google it and find threads on MN. that's what brought me here.

so if a new mum finds a thread where someone who fails/refuses to 'get' the gist of BLW has written 'a mix of BLW and spoon/puree' then they will leave the thread misinformed.

so i care on a macro but not a micro level, iykwim? couldn't give a shit about it for myself and dd, we'll just do what we do. but for people trying to find out what BLW is, it's important not to let the misapprehension stand.

[yet again baffled as to how BLW is contentious]

i don't undrestand why you would use a spoon and hold it in front of a baby and let them move their head towards it to check if they are hungry for it tbh. i don;t get that. why don't you just put the food infront of them and let them pick it up? what is the big deal?

I do what you do dejags - waited till 6 months then gave dd3 what we had to eat. some she feeds herself some I feed her, it depends on our moods

a heading
a title
a name for the way you feed your child

whatever

i never needed one

nor did i need to consult someone called Gill in order to feed my daughters

each to their own

but why does it matter that someone has invented some rules called blw and people mustn't make a mistake about the exact rules

it sounds a recipe for neurotic parenting

Bizzy - cos it's bloody hard to pick up yoghurt with your fingers when you are 38, let alone 11 months (I know, I have tried!)

In the spirit of BLW, we even tried giving him those yoghurt tubes with the end cut off... you can squirt yoghurt a REALLY LONG WAY with one of those!

you make it contentious though aitch! By saying things like Enid you are obsessed with failure, when I point out to someone asking for advice that it is possible to do both! Comments like that are stupid and hurtful - letting people make their own miinds up is more important IMO than labouring a pedantic, ideological point and trying to quash free speech on a subject!

my 2 year old has always eaten yogurt with her fingers!

what is wrong with a spoon and learning to use tools

surely if it's on a plate then you don't stop the baby picking up the plate and licking at tit which is in fact then jsut a big awkward spoon

Maybe A Little Bit of This and A Little Bit of That As the Mood Takes Both of Us Weaning.

Doesn't really lend itself to a snappy acronym though .

hana, can your come round and show mine how to do it, cos he thinks it's shampoo at the moment

littlelapin- pour it on fruit. or just don't give yoghurt.

I haven't actually read any blw threads

didn't realise it was a whole schema

just dont give yogurt

as it contravenes The Rules

god it is mad

right I must excuse mysefl and away to Matalan

I think some of the confusion lies in what you spoonfeed.

i.e. spoonfeeding purees/jars is not in line with the BLW philosophy, whereas spoonfeed yoghurt/soup/custard etc might be more in line iyswim.

I do understand that purist BLW excludes the use of the spoon (loading it and giving it to the baby excepted).

So, like many others I am somewhere in the middle.

your point about people being kicked off BLW threads for using spoons would be shocking if it were true, enid. as i've told you before, plenty of people use spoons, but the difference is that they don't spoon. it's a mindset.

i never used them because dd wouldn't allow it, unless she was able to grab the spoon and self-feed. but my friend Morv who writes on the blog when TalkTalk allows, her wee girl always liked being fed porridge in the morning, in the sense that she leant forward and ate off the spoon. and she wrote about that on the blog as one of her first posts.

personally i think it's fine, she thinks it's fine, whatever... no spooning is the key thing. no 'oh look, there's an aeroplane', no distraction, shovelling etc. and don't say that because you don't do it that no-one else does, i've seen my friends (clever bright, involved, cool women) sit and swap distraction tips with each other and my HV confidently told me that 'wee girls like a cuddly toy so if you take that away and give it back then they'll eat'.

"but why does it matter that someone has invented some rules called blw and people mustn't make a mistake about the exact rules

it sounds a recipe for neurotic parenting"

well, zippi, you could say the same about the whole traditional way of weaning, of how many cubes of frozen puree for each meal,which food to introduce when....

no-one has to do blw, at all ever, ever ever

no-one has to do puree weaning

you can mix finger food and pure...it just is not the same as BLW

feed your baby how you see fit...but it does not need to be divisive

if you were mixing breast and bottle feeding, then you woudln;t say you were exclusively breast feeding ...just as if you are spoon feeding and giving finger food, you are not exclusively BLW.....

but no-one is saying BLW is the only way or puree is the only way

but if you are going to discuss and debate it, then get the fundamentals right !

for me, i could not think of anything easier, than making some lunch and plonking some bits of it down in front of my LO, for her to pick up and eat while i eat.....

it doesn;t suit everyone, but it is great that there is an alernative, tried and tested to weaning on puree. IMHO