I’ve promised this post for ages, ever since we started to wean our little man on to solids, so well over a year. Given the mammoth leaps that Aiden has made with his eating in recent months (i.e. there is more food going in his mouth than on the floor) this seems like the perfect time to share our baby led weaning journey with you all.
Although this post may not be to everyone’s interest, I’ve been requested a lot to write about it on the blog. So with all things in life, it’s always best to start at the beginning…
Why Baby Led Weaning?
Well, why not? BLW is a pretty new concept compared to traditional weaning that consists of purees and working up to finger foods. Instead, after the gut has matured at 6-months (according to NHS guidelines) you can basically give your baby what you’re eating, so solid food which they can breakdown with their gums if they don’t have any teeth yet. Spoon feeding your baby is a big no-no, it’s all about letting them experiment, feel, play and feed themselves. It’s a kind of like messy play for them as well as transitioning on to solids.
Initially, all I wanted from the BLW concept was the hand-eye coordination skills that it helps to develop. However, after doing my research and now from my experience, it teaches little ones so much more. Firstly, it teaches baby’s how to chew their food and move the food around in their mouth to prevent choking. Learning how to chew early on gets them using their jaw muscles which helps to encourage speech later on. Since the baby is feeding themselves, they get to learn when they are full too and can prevent overeating later on. I also liked the fact that it makes a big focus of family meals because the baby is eating exactly the same food as everyone else. For this reason alone, BLW is often considered the lazy parenting option because you don’t have to mash or puree their food. Although I would have to disagree, it’s still hard work especially the amount of cleaning that is involved after every meal.
We’ve always been baby-led when it comes to Aiden and always follow his cues so BLW seemed like the natural path for us to follow.
Ready, Steady, Wean!
When we reached the 6-month milestone, even though I knew that BLW was the weaning route I wanted to go down with Aiden before he was even born I was still nervous to get started. Handing your baby lumps of food to eat is daunting and it was the risk of choking that scared me the most, especially since he had been exclusively breastfed since birth. Thankfully, we never had any choking incidents in the early days, but we did experience lots of gagging as Aiden was learning to move the food around his mouth. As terrifying as this was to watch, I knew that he wasn’t choking and trusted that he would move the food to the front of his mouth…and he did each time! During these gagging incidents as weird as it sounds I sang to Aiden, encouraged him and used a positive tone so he didn’t become scared, which really worked well for us.
With that in mind, you may be thinking why didn’t I just give up and give him purees? Well, there is still a risk of choking with purees, especially when moving on to finger foods because they haven’t learnt to chew yet. I’m not going to lie, I was dubious at the beginning and Aiden has eaten purees, but I will get to that later, but I decided to stick with it and now I’m so glad that we did.
Our BLW Set Up, First Foods & Experimenting
Although nervous I was so excited to get started. We fell in love with the Stokke Tripp Trapp highchair long before Aiden was born and purchased it a few days before we started weaning. Our favourite feature about the chair is that it doesn’t come with a table, which means Aiden sits right at the table with us rather than having a separate table attached to the highchair. To save on the clearing up, we later purchased a Tiny Diner, which we love! Although there is still mess to be cleared up, it’s handy for when you’re eating out if hygiene is a worry for you as it’s easily portable. At first, we didn’t bother with bowls and plates at every mealtime as they normally ended up on the floor. We were firm about introducing cutlery to his mealtimes from early on though and he’s really good with them now, but still likes to use his hands when he can.
More experienced BLW parents will say that there is no such thing as first foods when you start out because after 6-months babies can practically eat anything, except salt, honey, whole nuts and being conscious of sugar content. I was conscious of starting at the ‘deep end’ with meat and more complex food, so at the beginning, I started with single foods like apple slices, avocado, scrambled egg, banana, porridge, sweet potato chips before graduating on to proper meals.
Aiden was so ready to start weaning, so within 2 weeks we were up to 3 meals a day. I would say it took a little while before he started to actually consume his food rather than playing with it. Sometimes he would nibble on bits, other times he would inhale his food and sometimes he just wasn’t interested. Even though I knew that his main source of nutrition was still his milk, it didn’t stop me worrying about the times that he didn’t eat a single thing.
It didn’t take us long to graduate from single foods onto proper meals, he basically ate what we ate but I would separate his portion before adding the salt. This has made mealtimes far easier! Gill Rapley’s BLW recipe book was a great source of inspiration for me to cook BLW friendly family meals as well as a couple of decent BLW Facebook groups. My freezer was also an invaluable friend because it meant that I could stash foods suitable for Aiden (with no salt) when Alfie and I fancied a takeaway or pizza night.
Handling the Judgmental Looks
Baby Led Weaning is different, innovative and not everyone will agree with why you’re doing it. You will get sly remarks, questions like “won’t they choke on that?” and dagger eyes in your direction because you’re not feeding your baby a puree. Ignore them, you’re not a bad parent. You’ve just chosen a completely different weaning method to the majority. BLW is fun, messy and a joy to watch your baby explore food. Enjoy the journey and forget the haters!
It’s Not So Black & White
A purist would say that we haven’t done BLW at all. Yes, Aiden has had the odd puree since we started weaning him onto solids. They’re handy and convenient when travelling or eating out, especially in the early days when you’re not sure whether to commit to it or not. He hasn’t had many and in our experience it didn’t affect any of his BLW skills or confuse him, but all babies are different.
As mentioned above, spoonfeeding is totally against BLW, but I’ll openly admit that we’ve done it. Normally, and this is fine with BLW protocol, we preload the spoon or fork and hand it over to Aiden to feed himself. In the early days, I used to hold the end of the spoon lightly as a guide to save my walls from a porridge flinging! However, sometimes if Aiden was clingy, tired or just lazy he didn’t want to feed himself and wanted to be spoonfed. We weren’t forcing the food onto him, he was happily taking it from the spoon, but he wasn’t holding the spoon himself.
All parents, new and experienced will tell you that nothing is as simple as black and white when it comes to parenting – we all wished that it was! You have to do what is right for your own child and this will vary from day-to-day. I always say and will always say that we’ve done our version of BLW and it’s been a massive success for us, so that’s that!
Aiden is a massive egg muffin fan!
Where We Are Now
At 18-months old, there is much less food on the floor because Aiden is a typical boy and hoovers up practically everything that is put in front of him. This boy loves his food, particularly curries, fish dishes, pasta, baked sweet potatoes, stir fries and he is partial to his mama’s green smoothies too. He really isn’t fussy at all, which has made this whole weaning process easier for us. Trying to spoon-feed Aiden anything is a massive no-no in the BLW handbook, but also in his eyes too. Now being so independent he prefers to feed himself using his cutlery. We’ve taken him out to restaurants from an early age, so he’s pretty well-behaved (most of the time) and will sit and devour his food himself. He now also asks for ‘more’ if he’s struggling to load his spoon himself or will quite happily eat his rice grain by grain and refuse your help…ahhh toddlers!
There’s no right or wrong weaning process, it’s about finding the right way for your baby and what works best for you as a family. BLW was definitely the right path for us and Aiden has flourished because of it. I will happily be using BLW again should baby number 2 come along. 😉
Baby led weaning wasn’t really around when my son was born, but I think I did it to some extent. Sounds like he is thriving on it!
Actually, in theory, it’s been around forever, especially wen you think that cavemen probably made purees for their children. Generally, it’s considered a new concept because of all the marketing of baby food.
That high chair is beautiful. We did baby led weaning and it was definitely much easier than when I did purée stuff the first time.
It’s miles easier isn’t it!! 🙂
I’m not a parent, so was really unfamiliar with the concept of baby led weaning. Found it a fascinating read though. x
Thanks Alicia, happy to hear you found it interesting.
Another baby led weaning mama over here, I love it! My first born is a fuss pot when it comes to food, she was traditional weaned and unfortunately I was young an naive and fed her rice cereal and jars. My other two 24m and 7m eat rings around her. Beautiful chair but I couldn’t cope with cleaning it. Great read 🙂
Yay!!!! We do love the chair, but it’s actually incredibly easy to clean.
We did both with Blake we started off with purees but he wouldn’t eat anything. We moved on to blw and have no regrets.
The only thing now is at 16 months he’s got do fussy and food us more on the floor than eaten.
Aiden went through a fussy period too, but he’s over it now thank goodness. Hope your little one passes through it soon.
As you said weaning is different in regards to each child but I like that you stated it can also be baby led too. That is what happened with my sister too.
Weaning is definitely a different experience with each child.
I bet he loved making a mess with everything! 🙂 You just have to do what is right for you and your family.
Oh, the mess…he loved it! Me, not so much. Ha! 🙂
Oh I loved weaning! It’s so much fun. We have the Stokke Tripp trapp too and I love it! Rosalie loves sitting up at the table with us xx
Yay! it’s such a great high chair.
Loved that you said purists will frown at your BLW.But that’s the fun of BLW You let the baby lead. Me and my hubby did the BLW too. The best part about BLW is babies learn to appreciate fullness .Overfeeding and childhood obesity can be very strongly countered with a good choice of food offered to the baby in BLW.
Awesome post .The chair us so cute I wish I could buy it.But mine is 4 year old and already sits with us at the dining ????
So true! We love BLW! The high chair doesn’t come with a tray and it grows with the child which is why I love. It transforms into an actually chair so it can even be used as an adult.
I am not always very interested in baby themed posts, but this was so interesting. I did not know about this- I assumed it was just feeding them anything (purees or whatever) when they feel like it instead of following a traditional transition from milk to solids. With regards to speech development I find that so interesting, because at school we see more and more children with speech issues, having to see a therapist from an early age. I always thought it was more to do with forward facing pushchairs, parents on phones (so they don’t speak to their babies as much) and using i-pads and TV’s instead of playing with children. But perhaps the use of purees and that sort of thing is also a reason behind this. Interesting food for thought anyway!
I also think that you should not worry about what other people think (or what you think they are thinking)- probably if you are out and about a lot of people are just looking at the cute baby and not thinking “why are they eating solid foods?” (or maybe looking at the mess that the baby is making!). Also, so many children cannot use cutlery properly that we have to teach this in Reception now, so the fact that this is encouraged is also a big bonus.
It’s so interesting to get your perspective, Maria! BLW is all about babies eating exactly what you eat and getting them involved at meal times – it teaches them so much. It’s such a great concept that still isn’t really explored that much because I think people are scared to step away from the norm and scared that their child will choke. However, babies are actually very clever and their gag reflex is higher up their tongue than adults, meaning that they are less like to choke.
It’s true, it really doesn’t matter what other people think, but when kids are involved everything becomes a sensitive issue because you always feel like your doing the wrong thing or second guessing.
I’m so surprised that you have to teach children how to use cutlery. Surely this should be down to the parents?
I love the highchair!
I really wanted to do BLW with both of mine, I was too scared with my first that he would choke. With my second he had a hypersensitive gag reflex which would make him projectile vomit if any lumps went in his mouth so we were stuck on purees until he was well over a year old.
Laura x x x
That’s a shame that you couldn’t try it, but you definitely made the right choice by your kids.
I agree that it’s about what works for each baby. I did mostly blw, but Toby’s dietary issues and generally difficult temperament meant we weren’t doing my dream of sitting around the table eating. He was spoon fed at times, but he also learned how to use a spoon from very early on and I don’t view independent use of utensils as a bad thing!xx
No, definitely not. Independent use of utensils is a great thing, especially considering Maria’s comment about her having to teach children to use them at school.
We haven’t blw before. At nearly 15 months chloe is still not fully weaned. She doesn’t manage meats yet. Main reason is because she has no teeth yet.
Babies are great at gumming foods like meat etc., even without teeth. 🙂
I have done both methods with my girls, with Lottie I did a mixture of the two an it really worked well for us she got to explore her foods and use her hands but I also knew she was getting some in her and not just on the floor. All about what works for you isn’t it – that egg muffin looks lush btw x
Yes! You have to do what works best for your baby and sometimes it means going against the rules.
Obviously I don’t have a baby but I find this so interesting to read. I love this idea! I remember seeing babies in public literally staring into space while being spoon fed food gloop they have no awareness for (or seemingly don’t). There was such a lack of interaction or interest. This way sounds far better as a learning process and development perspective!