Kids Dish

After he’d been exposed to a variety of fruits and vegetables and some different kinds of whole grain cereals Sam’s grandmothers were both distressed that he wasn’t eating enough proper baby food. When he was ten months old they both hinted that he was nursing too much and not eating enough from jars. Despite the fact that the foods he ate were soft, they seemed to be convinced that he was going to choke. When I told them that babies chewed with their gums since many don’t even get molars until well into the first year they didn’t believe me. They didn’t understand that he refused to eat when he wasn’t hungry and enjoyed nursing both before and after meals. They made me incredibly tense and defensive. Even though I knew that Sam was doing fine, I felt like I was constantly forced to defend my decisions.

My mom was constantly asking me if she could feed Sam totally inappropriate foods like steak, lollipops and hard candies. Not understanding the concept of proper nutrition, she kept asking me why I wouldn’t let her give him what she wanted to give him- cheesesteaks and ice cream. At parties my mother in law gave Sam crackers and he couldn’t get enough of them. She thought it was because he was hungry. It was really because they were salty, and salt was something he didn’t get much of at home. One day she asked Bob if Sam was eating enough. She was concerned that we don’t have any jarred baby food in the house. I didn’t understand why the jarred stuff is so much better than the real stuff. Why would I buy a jar of pears instead of giving him a pear to eat? He was ten months old and had a ton of teeth. He was fine with small pieces of food and didn’t need purees anymore. Just because I wasn’t shoving food in his mouth didn’t mean he wasn’t eating.

I understand that breastfeeding and self feeding are things that were completely foreign to my mother and mother-in-law. Their experience was that babies got formula on a three to four hour schedule for a month and were expected to sleep through the night with no nighttime feedings by six weeks. As early as one month cereal was added to the bottle to help with sleeping through the night and pureed solids were started in earnest at four months with meats by six months. I’m sure by the time their babies were ten months old they were eating a full breakfast, lunch and dinner with snacks and desserts. But my baby didn’t.

To make everyone happy I kept yogurt, a few jars of baby food, and cereal in the house so the grandparents could feed him with a spoon. The rest of the time he fed himself with some help from us. Now that he’s a full-fledged toddler Sam refuses to eat unless he’s hungry. Sometimes he’ll let someone feed him but most of the time he’d rather feed himself. He’s a picky eater when he wants to be and eats almost anything the rest of the time. At sixteen months his weight is still low, but he’s met all of his developmental milestones, many of them a full visit early. I’m glad I let Sam wean himself onto solid foods. He’s never struggled with textures and never choked. If fruit has a seed or if he can’t chew the skin he’ll pick it out of his mouth and either throw it on the floor (a habit I’m trying to break) or hand it to me. It’s a shame that being nagged by the grandparents, the people I would have liked to have turned to for support, was the only negative to baby-led weaning.

baby-led weaning, solid foods, starting solids, breastfeeding, self-feeding