BLW - Can I have a show of hands, please?

[MummyTL]

Purely out of curiosity, and in no way to pass judgement, here's a quick poll for parents with babies who are being weaned at the mo.
Are you doing BLW or pureé?
Did you start off one way and then switch to the other?
Any comments as to why you chose this particular route are very welcome. Especially from parents who had heard about BLW but chose not to. Thanks folks.

According to various websites, no honey, no peanuts, no added salt (or sugar, but not as important as the salt)

I think some people wait a while before introducing things like eggs, meat, wheat etc but I'm sure Aitch or someone will be able to advise you on that.

And small foods like raisins etc are better when they can pick them up between finger and thumb, before that they're likely to choke on them.

I went to 'weaning' to post a question asking if there were any books on weaning a baby at 6 months rather than 4 months, found out about about BLW and aitch's blog and my question was answered. To me it just seems the natural way to start feeding a 6 month old baby.

The natural way to feed a 6 month old baby who just thinks its amusing if you I to spoon feed her that is . Oh maybe you should just ask her - I like to think I am in control, but it did't really have anything to do with me...

"If I try to spoon feed her"

I hadn't heard of BLW until we were a couple of weeks into purees, this coincided with DS deciding that he hated spoons so we started mainly having finger foods in a more BLW stylee. He will occaisionally have a bowl of mush. He's 7MO now and doesn't seem to want to eat anything but breadsticks and cheerios (when he was on mush he'd eat loads of everything!) - am offering fruit and veg like crazy and trying not to worry!

Any idea where to find that article online - I'd be really interested to read it.... can't find on telegraph website.

no, i didn't see it. i'd be keen to, though, if you could find a link.

I'm doing mashing with a fork

DS2 chocked on a piece of apple a few weeks ago. I was terrified. Yes, it's daft to puree, but weaning in this house is baby led. In that, I watch my babies' body language. It's obvious when they've had enough. I don't push it. DS2 (now 8 months)can go days without solids. ATM, he far prefers BF.

Just to go against the flow, I'm going to admit that I do puree stuff and spoonfeed it to my DD. She's 6 months old.
She enjoys feeding herself bits of finger food like bread and veg, but she seems to enjoy puree even more. She seems to find it easier to cope with.
In our house, a mixture of the two methods seems to work best.

i wouldn't recommend giving a baby of that age a piece of raw apple, it's quite a choking hazard as you discovered.

and let's, really let's, not get hung up about The Name again. do what your children want, call it what you want, read what you want into what you think they want, whatever... it's not the best name in the world, it's not a judgement on anyone else's methods, it's Just A Name.

if they'd asked me when they thougth it up i'd have suggested Baby Self-Feeding, for preference, as it actually says what it is and doesn't invite 'i am doing what i think my baby wants ergo i am being baby-led' comments.

and the 'coping' thing may be interesting from a developmental PoV, ruthchan. there is the theory, albeit not proven either way, that if the baby can't manage a piece of food then they aren't ready to handle it, iykwim? so someone doiing BLW (BLW the weaning method, as opposed to 'following a baby's lead') woudl specifically not interfere with their baby's food so as to retain as much texture, colour, and feel as possible so that the child can have as full a sensory experience as possible. what difference this might make, who knows? time may tell or it may not. certainly they are ready to eat a pea without choking at the same time as their hands become capable of picking it up, which is interesting i think.

Yes, Aitch, IKNYM about coping.
DD loves to be given pieces of food like bread, brocollii, other veg etc.
She happily sticks them in her mouth, chews them and sucks them until she either loses them into her bib or gets bored and throws them off her highchair.
At that point I offer her some spoonfeeding. That's the bit she smiles at the most. She eats really fast and always opens her mouth asking for more.
It's like the finger food is for experimentation and play, but the spoonfeeding is for real 'eating'.
She can manage the food pieces well enough, but the spoon feeding is clearly easier.

thing is, though, if you didn't spoon feed you don't know if her attitude to self-feeding would come on and she would have started eating more quantities with greater efficiency. it may not have, of course, but that's kind of what BLW explores. at the end of the say it likely doesn't matter, but i find it fascinating and i could not be arsed spoon feeding my dd while my dinner gets cold.

Found the article in the Telegraph at my mum's. Its fairly balanced, but this is the quote from the professor:

"Simon Langley-Evans, Professor of Nutrition at the University of Nottingham, is not convinced (by BLW), and believes that purees rather than finger foods are the best way to begin feeding babies. 'All you require for weaning at whatever age you decide to do it is to puree food to avoid choking and to make the transition to finger food once the baby has mastered the skill of putting food into the mouth and swallowing' he says. 'The handling of food in the mouth is not an innate process'.

So although he obviously doesn't know much about BLW, in a funny kind of way he is endorsing it - with BLW you start when your baby is able to put food in mouth (wouldn't be possible otherwise), and learning about and playing with solids is more important than getting nutrition solids ('its just for fun till they're one') as milk provides more nutrition for a baby than an ice cube of pureed carrot smeared on chops.

The funny thing is that all my baby books, including Karmel suggest giving your baby finger food to experiment with from about 6 months. I think that the difference is that with more people starting weaning at 6 months, more people are starting to wean when their babies are capable of eating finger food and questioning whether the puree stage is necessary if milk is still supposed to be the major source of nutrition.

that's hysterical, MP, it seems to me a ringing endorsement of BLW. i think the choking thing is Really overplayed, tbh, i asked the women on my blog how often their babies had choked and only a few said they had. plus, many said they'd never really gagged either.

he's saying that you puree to avoid choking, but in fact the truth of the matter is that babies are more likely to choke on a liquid (albeit not to any particular ill effect) than on a solid, particularly one that they are in charge of. he's not a physiologist, i note.

but he doesn't put forward any reasons for purees other than as a perceived learning process, but babies don't learn anything from purees, really, as it's just a liquid being spoonfed them when they're previously accustomed to controlling their own intake either by bottle or breast

child being spoon fed isn't 'mastering the art of taking food into their mouth and swallowing', but a blw child is, hence the endorsement i feel. if they can't put it into their mouths and swallow it, it just falls straight back out again. over time (a day or two in dd's case) they then 'master' it.

is he'd said it was damaging babies, causing them developmental issues etc i'd have been concerned. but the truth is that he doesn't know about blw/choking etc, he's a nutritionist and he wasn't drawing on his specialist knowledge to make his pronouncement, rather his lack of knowledge. had he said something about nutrition i'd have been all ears.

im dead interested to read this article, does anyone have a link (i can't find it).

I can type it for you tonight, but is it OK to copy a whole article onto a forum? Alternatively I could email it to your blog.

can you really be arsed? that would be great. and i don't think the smellygraph will be chasing up copywright breakers on here, tbh. however to spare you the trouble, givvus the headline and name of writer and i'll have a better search online first.

Well you've been arsed to set up a blog with loads of recipes and advice, so its the least I can do to do a bit of touch typing.

However, the title was

Talking point: Do babies really need to eat baby food

and the writer was Christina Hopkinson.

i think the nutritional deficiencies thing is overplayed again, tbh. the WHO recommendations for supplementing milk with food seems to come from a teeny study done in canada where they identified some mild nutritional defs in a small percentage (one baby from a field of about 14 rings a bell but i'd have to look it up) of exclusively bf babies. now, doiing BLW is Simply Not The Same Thing as exclusively bfing.

i have yet to hear of a baby (without undiagnosed special needs) who has not eaten a single thing. weight may go up and down (which is not unusual with growth spurts, little illnesses etc) and the amounts may vary, and that often understandably panics mothers into breaking out the spoons, but the thinking is that the babies do eat the things that satisfy their nutritional needs. dd eats broccoli by the bucketload for example, so perhaps she's supplementing her iron. or perhaps she just likes it, who knows? (tbh, btw, most blwers do use spoons for things like porridge etc, but more from a convenience perspective than a 'i must get this child to eat more' one.)

and people who say 'my baby wasn't ready' would, if they were doing BLW, be encouraged not to push matters by starting to spoon feed. if they're not ready, they're not ready, so you'd be inclined to give them time to get ready i'd have thought.

it makes more sense to me at least to say 'all babies are different therefore they will take to self-feeding at different times' rather than 'all babies are different but i must start feeding them at 6 months or they will be nutritionally deficient'.

Do you want me to post you the article?

BTW, DS has gagged (not choaked) twice since we began...just twice He was fine & sorted himself out. Yes, we do use a spoon for porridge & weetabix but that is more to do with me not wanting to wash it of the walls - he seems fine with everthing else

ooh yes, that'd be great coriander. you have my email i think. i'd like to find a link though as i'd put it up on the website. all info is good, i reckon.