Baby-Led Weaning: Why and How We’re Doing It

If you’ve seen my Instagram stories at all over the past month, you’ll know that we’ve been doing Baby-Led Weaning. At least once a week, I have someone ask me about it. What is it, why are we doing it, and isn’t feeding spaghetti to my baby a bad idea? (Spoiler: it’s not)

Starting with the “what”. Bab-Led Weaning is really simple. Instead of feeding your baby pureed fruits and vegetables, or that horrible rice cereal as a first food, you feed them regular food. Regular people food. Every single meal, we put Bastian in his high chair. And then give him small pieces of whatever food is on my plate.

The summer that Seth and I started dating, I was living in France as an Au Pair. Before I left, I read a book that’s become my absolute favorite parenting book, “Bringing up Bebe“. There are a lot of reasons I love this book. One of the French parenting techniques that it talks about is how to raise children that aren’t picky eaters. In the book, they don’t call it Baby-Led Weaning, because in other countries, it’s just how kids eat. In fact, there are VERY few countries outside of America where people feed their children pureed fruits and vegetables mixed together instead of real food.

First of all, I wouldn’t want to eat baby food, so why would my child want to eat it? I wouldn’t blame him for refusing or spitting out a mixture of pureed rice, squash, and apples. That sounds disgusting. Another reason we do BLW, is that my child isn’t going to be eating pureed foods for his entire life. So why would I go through the hassle of forcing him to eat unappetizing pureed food now, only to force him to get used to eating real, solid food a few months later?

Before I go a little bit further into the “why”, I just want to say that Bastian’s pediatrician approved of Baby-Led Weaning. In fact, he recommended it. So for the few people that have let me know that my decision to feed my son regular food is going to kill him – it isn’t. I think I’ll just keep trusting my pediatrician on this one.

I don’t want to raise a picky eater. Recently I was speaking with my mom, and she said that one of the greatest parenting struggles she had to deal with, was picky eaters. I remember a few of my siblings sitting at the table and screaming because they didn’t want to eat the nutritious meal placed in front of them. What they wanted instead was a tortilla with ketchup. If I can at all avoid this situation, I’m going to.

When I lived in France, I was honestly amazed at the wide range of food the children I watched would eat. I only once heard a complaint about the food they were given. Once, the 2 year old didn’t want to eat tomatoes. He’d had tomatoes with his lunch and was tired of them. However, he ate them anyway. These kids were fed everything. I distinctly remember one meal was Farro, smoked salmon, and steamed spinach. The kids ate all of it. Even I didn’t want to eat the steamed spinach.

The concept of BLW is really simple. Bastian just started sitting up really well on his own. So before he could sit in his highchair, we put him in his Bumbo with a tray. Since none of his teeth have cut through yet, not a lot of the food we give him actually gets ingested. But I just let him feed himself. I give him everything we eat, with very few exceptions. If there is a food that’s spicy, I avoid that food, or I suck on it first to remove the sauce(gross, but mom life is kinda gross haha). There have also been a few times that we’ve made homemade salsa and I’ve kept part of it separate that doesn’t have the jalapenos  and raw onions. I feel like those are really strong flavors that I can introduce later.

There are books you can read and facebook groups you can join that can give you guidelines to follow. And I truly believe you should feed your child however you think is best. The way that I’ve decided is best for our family, is Baby-Led Weaning. I could honestly go on for pages about why I love doing BLW and why I think it’s the best thing ever. I seriously love that my son’s favorite food is BROCCOLI. But if there’s any information that I missed or questions you still have, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them!