Comments on: Choking – why we need to stop uselessly fretting about it and instead Learn What To Do If It Happens.

By: Aitch

Aitch — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 17:42:31 +0000

I presume the point you are trying to make is an undermining one, but in fact it merely serves to reinforce the point that I was making, which was that we should accept that, yes, bad things can happen and take steps to know what to do about them. You can leave your child unbuckled in his or her car seat every day of their lives and they’ll come to no harm so long as you never have an accident. It’s not an accident-prevention product, the car seat, it’s a damage limitation one.
Similarly, you can leave them slipping about in a bath to their hearts’ content, so long as they don’t go under the water and drown. You keeping an eye on them doesn’t change the essential danger of child + water, it just means that in the event of something dangerous happening, you’re there to stop things getting too bad.
So with food, as I say, the thing to do with regards to choking is not necessarily to cut everything up into tiny pieces, unless you plan to be there for everything they eat for the rest of their childhoods (indeed, lives. I’ve said it before but the one time I used my resus knowledge was on a four-ish year old boy in a park. Total stranger to me, I’ve no idea how he was weaned).
Far better not to obsess pointlessly, but to be sensible and moderate and know what to do to limit damage in the event that something untoward happens. Teach your child how to manage food from a young age, teach them to chew first and swallow later, let them learn how to handle a larger item, within reason. All the while with you watching, just as with the bath. After all, if your child chokes on something that until that moment you didn’t consider ‘choking hazard food’, you’ll both be better served by an infant resus course than a smug satisfaction that you were doing everything right re food until then.

By: Richelle

Richelle — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:53:38 +0000

I obsessively cut up choking hazard food. I also obsessively buckle my children’s seat belts when we travel in the car, and obsessively not leave them alone in the bath tub.

By: Aitch

Aitch — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 23:39:39 +0000

I suppose anything round could get stuck in a throat, adult or child. But when they were very wee I smushed things like that just a bit before sticking them on the highchair.

By: nadine

nadine — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:07:03 +0000

Well remember adults can choke on food too, but it doesn’t mean whatever food it was isn’t safe for them.

I don’t get why these kids choked though. How in the world do you choke on a blueberry? I’ve been doing BLW with my 6 month old but this article worries me. I know the book says babies can choke on purees, but actually I’ve never heard of that happening.

By: Baby Led Weaning Diary.. And it’s goodbye from Siobhan and some stuff about choking. - Baby Led Weaning

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:29:51 +0000

[...] 6 weeks into our BLW journey the subject of choking does tend to linger at the back of my mind. Not in a scary way, but just (god forbid) if anything [...]

By: Rah

Rah — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:43:49 +0000

Both my boys were BLW’d – The first (now 3) gagged on everything, but never choked. The second (8mo) rarely gagged but the other day, choked on a piece of fluff he’d picked up from the carpet. It could have happened to anyone, any child, any place, irrelevant of how they weaned – the course only took a couple of hours and in a second of blind panic, was worth every milisecond!

Needless to say, he was fine, brought it back up with a load of sick, had a feed & cuddle and crawled happily off to find his next toy while I sobbed in a heap on the floor.

By: Aitch

Aitch — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 09:28:15 +0000

I think there is a danger of getting things out of perspective reading ANY Daily Mail article, Gill, that’s practically their modus operandi… ;-D I posted the blog piece in response to some panicked posts I saw on our forum and on Mumsnet, the article upset a lot of parents. Certainly, at three and five, my children religiously bite grapes into two because I thought it was a great habit to get into from an early age, but I do think that the main thing as a parent, regardless of weaning approach, is to have an idea what to DO if there is a choke situation. Like I say, the only time I’ve ever done infant resus was on someone else’s kid in the park.

I suppose I see it much as I see car seats, my two could clamber all over the back of the car and be perfectly safe so long as no-one ploughs into the back of us, but in case of that one time when things go wrong, I like either to know what to do or to have a safety mechanism in place.

By: Gill Rapley

Gill Rapley — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:56:33 +0000

While I don’t want to dismiss the risks of choking in babies, or suggest that it isn’t a good idea to cut grapes and cherry tomatoes in half, I do think there’s a danger of getting things out of perspective, based on the DM article. First, the little girl: She was three years old! Even if you were to decide to cut up blueberries for a baby of six months, would you really expect to still be doing it when he or she was three? Maybe the problem in this case was more to do with the fact that the blueberries were in ice cream, which slides down so easily? Or maybe it’s just the case that anyone can choke on a blueberry, given the right circumstances?
What about the 18-month-old little boy? The DM article doesn’t say how long Toby had been having grapes, nor how long his parents planned to cut them up for him, but I can’t help wondering whether the fact that he had never been allowed to discover how to manage a whole grape might not be relevant. Maybe his lack of experience was more crucial than the fact that the grape was whole? I like Kat’s comment about teaching children to bite such foods rather than put them in whole and I would suggest that the earlier they get the chance to begin practising this, the better – maybe not at six months, but at least soon after they’ve shown that they can cope with halved grapes. What do others think?

By: day care

day care — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:01:16 +0000

childcare Albuquerque…

[...]Choking – why we need to stop uselessly fretting about it and instead Learn What To Do If It Happens. – Baby Led Weaning[...]…

By: Today’s discussion: baby-led weaning « Penarth Baby Latte

Today’s discussion: baby-led weaning « Penarth Baby Latte — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:10:35 +0000

[...] course may be an idea for all new parents (St. John ambulance and Red Cross both organise them), but this article puts it quite neatly when it reminds you that you have to make sure that you cut stuff up – [...]