I remember back in the heady days of thinking about weaning my daughter no.1 I was utterly convinced by the six month line in the sand, in the way that only an idiot a first-timer can be. I had read it in a book, had I not?
My actual human child, however, had other ideas and a couple of weeks before this magic date she grabbed some soft fruit and started eating it. Immediately, I knew she was ready. Well, durrr. She was eating a peach, after all, what further proof did I need?
And so began the BLW journey/voyage/odyssey/thingybob that got us all here at this ludicrous hour on a Friday night.
Since then, my view on weaning has become more relaxed than ever, and it started off pretty flexy in the first place to be honest. A preemie second child who started noshing at 5 months corrected, also helped.
You can lead a child to food, but you cannot make them eat. It seems to me perfectly obvious that if they can do it, you should let them. (Unless they are strikingly precocious and trying to unwrap a packet of Jammy Dodgers at 16 weeks. Do intervene in that instance.)
This study seems to me eminently sensible on the subject. It looked at when 602 babies reached for food, found that 56% had done so before 6 months but 6% still hadn’t done so by 8 months (with the rest inbetween) and concluded that BLW is ‘is probably feasible for a majority of infants, but could lead to nutritional problems for infants who are relatively developmentally delayed’.
So look, if they’re not eating, and you are stressing, for god’s sake try them with a loaded spoon. Further more if they won’t self-feed at all and you are tearing your hair out, just feed ’em, if they like it. Honestly. Don’t over-think this stuff. It’s just food.There is no BLW heresy.
As the mother of two daughters there is a chance, God willing, that I will one day be a grandmother and let’s face it by then all my hard-won Noughties knowledge will have been thrown out of the window. My kids will probably feed their kids blue pills at four weeks old, because that will be the most up-to-date thinking.
And I will just have to suck that up and smile through what teeth I have left .
In the meantime, all we can do is ignore the weird media/academia politics, examine the evidence and be grateful that for BLWers, the decision as to when to wean is taken out of our hands by the chubby fists of our babies.
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Tags: baby led weaning, BLW, study, UCL
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Just wanted to say thank you and well done for coming back to your blogging and sharing your thinking on this. Has been great to read your 3 latest! As you’d say – good on yer :)
cheers! when am i ever going to get any actual work done now, though? ;-D