From the first slimy banana to make it to her mouth (but no further) to the deep orange-yellow farm fresh pastured egg yolks smeared across her pudgy cheeks, as she gnaws inquisitively on a baby spoon, Anika has entered the world of Baby Led Solids. We're forgoing the usual rice cereal, baby food jars in favor of well, real food that Anika feeds herself. Just a few years ago, if you had told me to just let my baby feed herself real food like the rest of the family was eating, I would have thought you were crazy. I was all set to make my own purees the moment we got our Champion Juicer (it does, for those interested, have the capability to make 'baby food'). But the more I thought about things, and those things became closer and closer to a reality, the more it made sense to just let our baby eat table food.
I first became acquainted with the concept of Baby Led Solids from reading the book, Real Food for Mother and Baby. I thought it was an interesting concept, but as Anika had yet to be born yet, didn't give it much thought. When I read about it again in The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, and then in the book Baby Led Weaning (which is all about baby led solids, but written by a couple of English ladies, so weaning to them denotes the beginning of solids, not the cessation of breastfeeding), I began to give serious thought to this, because, simply put, it just makes good sense.
The basic gist of this type of approach to the introduction of solids is to watch and trust your baby. Instead of picking an arbitrary date to start feeding solids, you watch your baby for signs of solids readiness--around the middle of the first year, but can be later than that:
Loss of tongue thrust reflex
Sitting up on their own
Showing an interest in solid foods by grabbing food, and well, eating it
These signs serve important purposes, much more important than the dates on the calendar in determining when to introduce solid foods to a baby. When babies are born, they are born with an immature gut that isn't equipped to deal with digesting solid foods. As the baby grows, so does their digestive system by their gut sealing up and starting to produce digestive enzymes necessary for proper digestion of solid foods. You can tell their insides are ready for solids when their outsides are, namely, in the baby's ability to safely feed themselves. It's pretty neat how God's design of things makes it easy for us to determine when to introduce food, just by simple observation. Allergies, unless there's a family history of them, aren't as big of a concern when baby is ready for food, and therefore the order of the foods to be introduced doesn't have to be as stringent. (and as this article suggests, there's really been no rhyme or reason for the current traditional recommendations for the order of foods one introduces) We're planning on avoiding grains for the most part during the first year, as a baby doesn't develop the digestive enzymes to digest grains until about a year--once their one year molars come in (again, there's the wisdom of God's design of things) as well as foods that present obvious choking hazards. Oh, and speaking of choking--a baby's gag reflex is still pretty far forward on their tongue during the first year of life, so a baby feeding themself is in a lot of ways safer from a choking standpoint, since they will gag food out that's too big for them to safely swallow. It's pretty nerve wracking the first time they gag, because if you didn't know what you were looking at, you would think they were choking. Regardless, it's always a good idea to stay with your baby while they eat.
The other important part of this process is to trust your baby--trust that they will eat solids when they are ready, whether it's 6 months, or 8 months or beyond. I was surprised to find that it is physiologically normal for a baby to be exclusively breast or formula fed for up to the first 12 months of their life, if needed. Most babies will show interest in food before the 12 month mark, but that put my mind at ease, when everything we've introduced to Anika she hasn't really technically eaten. She just doesn't seem interested in the eating part, though she sure is fascinated by the bits of food we set in front of her for her to explore.
Baby Led Solids isn't just about ditching purees in favor of table food. It's also about the importance of allowing one's own baby to self regulate the whole eating process--from the mechanics of getting the food into their mouths, to how much, to even the particular foods they are drawn to. This was the icing on the cake for me, because, as a breastfeeding mom who relies on watching my baby's cues for hunger, I have to trust Anika's ability to self-regulate her hunger and food intake every time she nurses. The baby's ability to determine the pace and amount of feeding has been shown to decrease the likelihood of obesity later on in life, and continuing to allow a solids-eating baby to self-regulate their intake of food goes right along in the same vein of thinking. An added bonus is that many people who have done the traditional pureed baby food route with their first child, but Baby Led Solids with subsequent children observed less picky eating behavior and less battles over eating in general with their subsequent children. I've already noticed that when I tried to feed Anika egg yolks off a spoon, she wanted no part of me feeding her, but when I gave her the spoon, she instantly, yet clumsily, guided the spoon to her mouth. Some parents have even noticed that their babies would refuse to eat certain foods that they later found out they were allergic to.
When so much rests on my shoulders as a parent to guide and teach my child how to live in this world, it has been an amazing experience so far to just let go and let the process of eating unfold on its own. It's teaching me that babies are capable of more than we realize. And that mealtimes are fun!
I'll leave you with the following video...this is NOT Anika :) :
My kids always preferred the whole foods as to mashed and we rarely started before six months :) Way to go Mama!
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