Welcome to Baby Led Weaning
The Mush Stops Here
Baby Led Weaning, quite simply, means letting your child feed themselves from the very start of weaning. The term was originally coined by Gill Rapley, a former health visitor and midwife.
According to the most recent research most babies reach for food at around six months, which is also the time that mothers are being encouraged to wean* by their Health Visitors, in accordance with the WHO guidelines.
The distinct advantage of weaning at around six months is that by then, our children are developmentally capable of feeding themselves proper food, in other words – no more mush!
You just hand them the food in a suitably-sized piece and if they like it they eat it and if they don’t they won’t. (But they do, really they do… check out the baby with the pork chop).
That’s the essence of Baby Led Weaning. No purees, no ice cube trays, no food processor, no potato masher, no baby rice, no weird fruit and veg combos… just you and your child, eating food that you enjoy with you and your family.
Please browse the site, or come and join us on the very welcoming Baby Led Weaning Forum
* re ‘wean’. This is meant in the Brit sense, not the American. In the UK, ‘weaning’ means ‘adding complementary foods’, whereas in the States it means ‘giving up breastfeeding’. Two nations divided by a common language, and all that. In fact, there is even a helpful hands-across-the-ocean translation thread on the subject on the forum, which solves the mystery of what the UK equivalent of the Graham’s Cracker might be. (While we’re on the subject of terminology… if it was up to me, I’d have called this whole thing
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