Guest blog by Ela Law, Ela Law Nutrition
People often confuse baby-led weaning with giving their baby finger foods. Baby-led weaning involves finger foods, but it is so much more than that! Finger foods tend to be given alongside purées by many people, but that doesn’t mean they are using baby-led weaning. At a certain age, children absolutely should start feeding themselves and eat a larger variety of differently textured foods. But:
In baby-led weaning you don’t wait for this certain age to come, you dive straight in when your baby is ready!
When you let your baby lead the way, you will provide the food and they will choose what and how much of it they will eat. This is a concept that might cause some anxiety in some parents; surely, we know best how much and what the child should be eating?
Or do we?
If I told you that almost all children are born intuitive eaters – they know how much they need, pick the foods their bodies require at the time and make their choices themselves, feel when they are hungry and full – would you not agree it makes sense to let them be ‘the expert’ in their feeding journey? Ellyn Satter calls this the ‘division of responsibility’. This means that you provide the food you want your child to have, and they decide what and how much they eat. It is really rather simple and beautiful. You give your baby autonomy by letting them decide what and how much they eat. And it’s not just a way of feeding for very young babies, the division of responsibility will also be very helpful when children move into fussy eating phases, because your child will feel in control (let’s face it, refusing food is one of the few things they can control!) and you will be relaxed about it, so the risk for mealtime battles reduces drastically.
And once you allow yourself to trust your child on this, you will have so much fun with baby-led weaning, and, more importantly, so will your child.
Apart from raising an intuitive eater, which will be a lifelong benefit, there are several other benefits of baby-led weaning.
It helps babies’ hand-to-eye coordination – Great practice of using their hand-to-eye coordination with an instant ‘reward’!
It helps the development of manual dexterity – grasping, pincer grip, dropping and picking up with their hands are all key skills that develop quickly once a child starts self-feeding.
Less risk of overeating – babies decide when they had enough, and they are less likely to eat just to please someone who is feeding them.
It encourages safe eating – babies quickly learn what foods need chewing, what foods are soft and easy to eat, what foods need a bit more work, how to move food around in their mouths, how to chew and what the best size pieces of food are for them (a quick note here: please be mindful of how you offer food to your child: cutting grapes, cherry tomatoes and other small, round fruits in half lengthways, and sausages, carrots or other foods of that shape into strips rather than discs will reduce the risk of choking).
It is fun! Let’s not forget that eating together as a family can be really lovely quality time, it is so much more interactive and interesting for both the parents and the baby to share a meal than for baby to sit in their highchair on their own. And it’s also quite funny to watch them with food all over their faces.
Allowing them to reject food can make them more willing to try new things – they are allowed to decide whether to eat the new food or not, so trying it does not come with any pressure to eat or finish anything on their plate.
Experiencing real food with real textures and flavours – this can help them develop a positive attitude to food and in particular to trying new things, as well as expand their knowledge of the world around them.
It’s a lot easier, less time consuming, less complicated, and also much less hassle for eating out – you don’t have to make special dishes, you don’t have to worry about what stage your baby is or ‘should be’ in, you don’t have to buy a whole lot of equipment to make, store and feed food, and when you eat out, your baby can for the most part just share what you are eating.
Anecdotally, babies who self-feed are less likely to become picky eaters later on – even though almost every child will go through a phase of fussy eating, which is completely normal, those that have used baby-led weaning tend to have less severe fussy phases and revert back to enjoying a variety of foods again.
Traditional weaning (including different stages, spoon-feeding and parent-led eating) is by no means bad for the baby. I just happen to think that baby-led weaning has many more benefits and is a more natural way of eating for your little one.
So I’ll leave you with this to ponder:
The definition of ‘spoon-feeding’: ‘to provide someone with so much help or information that they do not need to think for themselves’.
I think in this day and age, independent thinkers are going to save the world, so why not start their independence with something as simple as feeding?
About the Author
Ela Law is a Nutritionist (ANutr), Certified Intuitive Eating Counsellor and Baby-led Weaning Specialist based in Sevenoaks, Kent.
Her approach is aligned with the HAES® movement, which is inclusive of all body sizes and challenges social structures that discriminate against people based on social and cultural characteristics. She uses the principles of Intuitive Eating to guide clients away from the pitfalls of diet culture and help them make peace with food, reject diet mentality thinking and develop a new understanding of their bodies and needs. Her sessions with clients can be online (world-wide) or face-to-face (Sevenoaks and Bexley), and she has an online course on baby-led weaning and offers 121 baby-led weaning and family feeding consultations.
For more information visit www.elalawnutrition.co.uk and follow her on Facebook or Instagram.
コメント