BLW vs purées. Discuss...

[EyeballsintheSky]

Come on, y'know you all love debating this!

OK, seriously DD is 6 months next Thursday so the fun is about to start. I was chatting to mothers of older babies at my playgroup and when I mentioned BLW they looked at me in horror - every one of them had puréed.

I am TOTALLY confused and really need some pros and cons of both. I have looked at Aitch's blog but there's amost too much info there and I really don't know which route to take.

So, wise ladies of MN, please help

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If you generally cook from scratch you shouldn't have too many problems. Don't add salt to anything, but IMO don't get too worried about salt in other stuff if you generally have a healthy diet (e.g. bread, houmous etc. I just give without worrying too much). As long as it's not too heavily processed.

Some HCPs say don't give too many whole grains as can inhibit iron intake, but it's about balance. Sometimes DD has brown bread, sometimes white.

Good first weaning foods are roast veg, rice cakes and houmous, toast, bananas, nectarines.

There are loads of tips on here and on the blog forums for when you get stuck for ideas. Remember "food is fun until they're one", don't get too stressed and don't worry what other people thing/what they are doing.

I liked the idea of BLW but for me there just wasn't enough information in a format I felt was easily understandable. I am definitely the type to read all the books I can get my hands on and to me I just wasn't confident enough to go ahead with it based on the info I could find.

DD was very ready for food by six months but still at 8 months nowhere near able to feed herself anything. It seems a bit counter intuitive to me to let her attempt to feed herself. I give her things from my plate when I'm eating but just for fun really. She doesn't really manage to 'eat' anything just make it soggy.

I love doing purees, it makes me feel great to give her food I've prepared specially for her. And I find it a lot easier when we're in public to feed her rather than having her chucking food around.

DSs' orthodontist reckons there is a link between the trend for feeding babies "mush" and other soft foods and the increase in jaw/teeth alignment problems in later life.

I agree that BLW is messy in that babies manage to spread food all over themselves but DD never throws food around, in fact I have rarely heard of any BLW babies who throw food around. As it is their only way of getting food they are probably too busy trying to eat it!

It's only now at 13 months that DD has started dropping food over her high chair as a sign of no longer wanting it, she has never done it until now.

I feel quite strongly about BLW, and find, I guess as with anything to do with parenting, that I get quite defensive about doing. When people are saying (not necessarily here, just in general) "Oh, I could never do BLW, I like to know that they are actually eating/how much they have eaten" etc. it makes me feel like they think I must be starving DD, when in actual fact she has gone up a few centiles since being weaned.

And yes, BLW is messy, but it will be messy whatever stage you do it. Babies don't go from being spoon fed to having perfect table manners

Children need to learn to eat 'proper food' at some point, so you may as well start as you mean to go on. You're just having the mess etc at 6 months instead of 12, 14 or 16 months or whatever.

Their gums are perfectly good at chomping through lumps of chicken etc and if you give them food of a size or nature that they can pick up, they are then in control of the amount they have in their mouth which is thought to be safer.

Allowing them to feeed themselves empowers them and gives them something in their life that they can control - a good thing I think. They can decide how much they need to eat and what kind of food. ie if you put out a few different types of things, they will tend to pick at all of them some days and others, they will just home in on the carbs or the fruit or the protein depending on what they need at the time. Purees are a mix of lots of different flavours and the child has no choice or opportunity to learn about the different things that have gone in to it.

Babies naturally explore things by putting them in their mouths - BLW is just an extension of that. The more of a chance they have to explore food, the more familiar they will get with textures and tastes and be less inclined to get stressed over it.

The nature of BLW means that you as a parent has to back off and just watch them fiddle with their food etc. Lots of poor eating in babies is because the parents get stressed and anxious about how much is going in and you often see forced feeding and distressed babies trying to escape 'the spoon'. BLW encourages a more relaxed meal time which can make a happier time for everyone.

Basically - in my view - I would ask the others what their reasons against BLW are and take it from there. There aren't any as far as I can see unless you happen to have a child that still refuses to pick anything up by 12 months old but I haven't seen one of those yet!

You often see babies being fed nothing but jars at meal times and yet they manage perfectly well to hold and feed themselves a biscuit without choking . Enough said.

I loved the idea of BLW...

If I'd had a baby who loved the breast/bottle and was drinking plenty, had good weight gain etc. I probably would have gone down that route.

However, as DD wasn't drinking much milk and wasn't gaining and was slipping down the centiles I really had to help her get some nutrition in. She wasn't that fussed about eating and I don't think she would have had anything very much if left to her own devices.

I think you have to look at your own child and make the decision based on what's best for them. It's not for every baby, I don't think...

On the upside, while DD is still mainly purée fed, she's starting to do quite well with her finger food now and will be getting more of it as time progresses and her weight improves. So I think she'll get there in the end.

Both methods have their up sides and down sides IMHO. Do what you feel is most suitable for your baby based on her own individual needs and don't feel pressured one way or another.

db
xx

I have been doing with purees - can I ask a?

If I offer plenty of finger foods alongside the purees will I be able to get some of the pros of BLW (ie easier transition to lumpier foods etc)

Thanks

A slight dissenting voice here. I have nothing against baby-led weaning and seriously considered it, but really don't see it's as easy as people make out (or that pureeing is that difficult). I felt if they just ate finger foods based on what I was eating myself they wouldn't get much variety (i'm not so much worried about nutrition as realise they get most from milk, but think it's important the get a wide variety of taste). For me I think it would end up being quite a faff to do, and I would be cooking / preparing seperate foods anyway. For instance I wouldn't give shop-bought bread as I think it's too high in salt for a 6m baby and would therefore need to make my own more often. Again, when people say just give a piece of apple, it actually needs to be partly cooked to soften and wrapped in muslin etc. according to the recommendations, and it wouldn't take me that much longer to cook up a load, pureed it and frozen it. I do encourage my DD2 to take finger foods, but also give purees or mashed food.

By the way, she's making the transition the lumpier food very quickly with no problems, as did DD1 (although they both have teeth like a tiger shark so should do!)

startingtogetveryworried - i think that would be fine and dandy. I think a mixture is probably what a lot of people feel most comfortable with, and like most others ahve said, just do what you think is best.

I know I am totally converted to blw (I dont' really like the term, but thats another discussion, I use it so that everyone knows what i;m on about) but genuinely i do think it's easier - i know it's not rocket science to puree stuff but why would you bother doing that when you can just give the food in its natural form and save a few minutes and washing up the blender all the time? LAziness perhaps, but to me, also common sense. I mean if you particularly want apple sauce on something then fine, but otherwise just dont' bother with apples until they're a bit bigger! There are plenty of other fruits that are perfectly suitable early on.

Lack of variety isn't an issue because I do eat good, varied food, in fact, blw made sure that i ate good food during the day - at the beginning when it was a lot of roast veg or steamed veg or chunks of cheese and rice cakes and philly etc, I actually changed what I ate so I was eating that too, instead of eating a load of quick-fix junk, and my diet improved loads as a result, and its all stuff that tastes nice. You can keep leftovers and heat them up or make them into patties or stews or whatever, so its not like you have to cook from fresh every time. And as for evenings etc, I always have to cook a family meal anyway so it makes sense that she just has the same as the rest of us.

I also don't think it's really a fixed strategy or method, more of a general vibe, because all you do is watch the salt/sugar content and allergies and then try things out, hence there being nto a great amount of fixed info on it. I dont' see why you would need a scientific methodical approach to feeding your baby really, its' a natural thing and common sense applies throughout. I have never understood why babies shoudl have such vastly different food from grown ups, even up to the age when they're ordering from kids menus in restaurants - why is it assumed that kids dont' want to eat proper food?

So my (very longwinded) point is that it's a mindset, rather than a method, and I see that if you dont' have that mindset then you won't get the method, and that's fine. I dont' think puree fed babies are all going to explode and turn green or anything, it just doesn't make sense to me personally to feed my children that way.

I am only pregnant , so this is a long way off, but I plan to do both.
I didn't know about BLW when I weaned ds 4.5.
But I didn't find it stressful, messy or a pain, to do some purees. Plus before long, he was eating a mashed version of dh and mine's dinner. Problem solved. He never gagged, was sick, and before long he was eating proper food, that I had to do nothing to.
I can't understand why people get in such a tizz/mess about weaning.
But I will be largely doing BLW this time, but a few purrees, and a bit of home made risotto, mashed up, will be thrown in.
I am not sure that Aitch would approve of my method, but it is what I plan to do, at the moment.

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I suppose to me, preparing a meal for BLW is the same as for puree except that you don't mix it all together necessarily or puree it - you miss the last step essentially.

Giddly - re the apple thing - I agree that I wouldn't be so keen on raw apple chunks to start with either, so I opted for no apple or I stewed chunks of apple with pear or peach and rasins and cinnamon as a fab alternative. Just don't puree it so they can pick it up with their hands.

The salt thing and bought bread - I found that warburtons had the lowest salt content per slice and as long as you don't add salt to anything else, they would need to eat two whole slices in a day to reach their max daily limit.

I agree it's a mindset thing and for each meal you just need to answer two questions:

1. Can they pick this up with their hands? If not, add something to make it easier (e.g. grated cheese through rice makes it nice and easy to pick up) or take the item off the menu e.g. clear soup or use that item as a dip e.g. give toast fingers to dip in the soup....

2. Is this a chockable item e.g. cherry tomato, raw carrot etc? If yes, either take it off the menu for now or alter it in some way - cook it / cut it in half.

I gave my daughter very thin slices of apple to begin with. All you need is a decent sharp knife. She coped fine and was picking up a whole one not long later and biting into it.

I ended up mainly doing a sort of BLW thing without ever having heard of it even though I started off with purées because my daughter started to refuse spoons at about 8 months so I had no choice!

ds got his first teeth really early and was growing others at 6 months, so I thought he'd enjoy putting something he could swallow ni his mouth. To start off with he had a lot of cheese and banana, but at my aunt's and mum's he'd get lots of tastes of other bits and pieces. I did give him some organic shop-bought purees but I love watching him eat real food, he's so enthusiastic and I don't really like spoon feeding (I get bored) and he will have little bits of stuff that way now at 14 months, mostly yogurt.

My mum was quite annoyed by my stepsister turning up her nose at purees for her son (7 weeks older than DS, and I decided there was no reason why DS shouldn't have purees if on offer, just that I'd mix what he was fed but encourage him to finger foods etc.

So what are the best first things to offer. I see a lot of mentions of softly cooked carrot batons or broccoli florets so I'm guessing it's that and the trusty banana. How long would you go before intoducing everything else? I mean, I assume you don't start sharing your dinner out on day 1?

(I will read the blog as soon as DH comes home and can watch Demon Child. Until then I have to keep pulling her out of the fireplace!)

I started by giving one thing per meal, so if we were having a standard meat potatoes and veg she would have just the veg to have a look at first, then next time a few chunks of meat, and so on.

I thought good first veg were definitely broccoli florets (although in whatever form broccoli tends to give gas - to entire family not just baby ) courgette wedges or thick discs, and the biggest hit by far was sweet potato, wow, she would eat that until she was entirely orange. All of those I woudl stick in the steamer until soft. Carrot didnt' work so well for us but other people find it good and nwo at 14mo its a hit. In the winter any roasted veg was great. Parsnips and butternut in particular.

Fruit was the best first food though, large melon wedges went down well, and halved peaches or pears. I found with fruit like that that the larger the piece the better so they can grab it with both hands and suck the juice out of it. At the very beginning I did this with her sitting on my lap in front of me so i could catch it if it slipped out of her hands. Then finish it when she's done

Also rice cakes although everyone knows they taste like crap without something yummy spread on them. Mind you to them they are something new and exciting although the novelty wore off fairly quickly here!

I didn't really wait very long between offering new things it was just whatever was around, but I definitely only offered food once a day for quite a while... Then she started nicking it

I don't think Aitch would ever disapprove of a method, I think the whole idea is that you do what seems to work best and for us, that's what worked best. I have always had spoons around and loaded them and let her put them in ehr mouth herself if the food was not pick-upable. And other people spoon feed her quite regularly which i dont' mind too muchif that's what they are comfortable with.

She feeds herself yoghurt and jelly (well sort of squishes it mostly) now with the spoon.

My Demon Child is asleep

Ah shit this is a long post I'm sorry people. I always go into essay mode over food

I offered stuff each mealtime, and started off with bananas. At 6 months I was on maternity leave but would try to take ds out almost every day so lunch especially was what was easy to carry round - banana, gouda cheese sliced with a cheese slice, but I know another mum whose baby was used to cheddar cut up in cubes, part segments of satsuma (ds was born in May so started solids in November so they were in season), and lots of bread - usually toast at home and bread rolls when we were out and about.

Another advantage of blw is that babies like to mimic you, and it's easier if you can find things that are tasty and healthy for both of you, whereas purees never really appealed to me (I'm a bit of a picky eater).

I'm loving the sound of this. Thanks so much everyone for your thoughts and tips.

I'm just worried about giving dd the wrong things too soon or things the wrong size but it seems as long as initially things are sort of stick shaped and there is nothing small/hard enough to choke on (grapes/cherry toms etc) then it's all systems go.

I know that any weaning is more hassle and messier than milk only but I'm so excited and can't wait till next week

Oh, and presumably it's still good bit of milk feed before and after?

I use to keep milk feeds to the usual times and then either offer solid food inbetween times or just at my normal meal times. It takes a while before they eat enough to affect their milk intake anyway.

You can absolutely offer them spag bol on day one if you want to but just go with what you're comfy with - that's the important thing. Most things go straight through and out of the other end for a wee while, so just don't worry

Just indulge me while I be a teensy bit pedantic for a minute here. Technically you cannot do a mixture of BLW and purees, you either BLW or you don't. What you can do, and what most people seem to do, is do a mixture of finger foods and purees.

Ok now that is out of the way!

DD refused to be spoonfed and just wasn't very interested in food for a very long time so BLW was ideal for her. It meant I could give up worrying about trying to get food into her, there was far less waste as I just used to give her bits off my plate and allowed her to choose what she wanted to eat and when.

I was a full BLW advocate after that experience and really didn't see any point in weaning ds any other way. However he has other ideas! If I give him food on his tray he just shouts at me then starts crying, however if I put some in his mouth for him he is happy. He is also a very hungry boy and seems to get frustrated at not being able to self feed as fast as he wants to(even though I breastfeed him before his meals). So what I am now doing is giving him some mash(nothing specially prepared just a bit of what we are eating)for about half of his meal then giving him the same as finger foods. So for example he will have chicken carrot and broccoli mashed then the same as finger foods. It is important to me to do this so that he learns what the individual tastes and textures of different foods are. He is starting to be more interested in the finger foods so I hope to make the transition to fully self feeding soon

That'll teach me to be on two threads at once! Sorry my pedantry is misplaced, that was meant to go on another thread where people kept saying they were doing a mixture of BLW and puree

no i think that's been mentioned here too! lol don't worry anyway i guess technically you're right, although the other thing i'd point out is that finger foods tends to mean stick shaped dippy type things whereas blw refers to anything. Risotto has always been a firm favourite, eaten with the hands, but i wouldn't call it a finger food