Recent information has lead to Unicef’s Baby Friendly Initiative recommending that babies are weaned at 6 months and put straight onto finger food, completely avoiding the pureed baby food phase. This is known as Child Led Weaning.
Gill Rapley, deputy director of the Baby Friendly Initiative, has been a health visitor for 25 years and believes that babies should be fed purely on milk for the first six months and then weaned onto food that they can handle themselves.
By the age of six months children are able to sit unaided, to reach out and grasp and to chew. Therefore they have all the skills necessary to feed themselves. It is natural for babies to copy the adults and older children around them, this is how they learn everything that they do.
By using Child Led Weaning, mealtimes will just be an extension of this method. The child will simply grab at food that other members of the family are eating and put it in his mouth. This is motivated by curiosity rather than hunger and in time he will learn to bite, chew and eat. Each child will develop at their own rate, eating what they are ready for.
Advantages of this method are that it reduces the stresses of weaning and the very time consuming pureeing of food or the expensive buying of baby food. This makes life much easier for busy mothers. If children are not old enough to digest food, they will not try it and it is well accepted that young children know what food is best for them and by spoon feeding them we reduce the control that they have over this.
The lack of teeth at the age of six months is not a problem, as babies have very strong gums. Because they have limited finger control at this age, young children cannot hold food that might be dangerous or difficult to digest, such as peanuts, and therefore will not eat them. As long as there is a range of food available in suitable sizes for the child to hold, the baby will learn to try a wide range of foods.
Research has indicated that babies who first try lumpy food after the age of ten months are often fussier eaters so this method will help support a wider diet in the long run. The main downside of Child Led Weaning is that it is messy, but appropriate arrangements, such as a piece of plastic under the chair, can help to deal with this problem.
Traditionally, babies have learned to eat in this way, however as the baby food industry has expanded, babies have been encouraged to wean earlier and then require soft food. In 2002, the World Health Organisation supported the belief that children should not be weaned before six months and this information follows on from that.
