Once Upon a Dance (0s):
This episode is sponsored by Once Upon A Dance. As the days get busier but shorter and we spend more time indoors, I'm always looking for simple ways to help kids move their bodies, use their imaginations, and for us to connect as a family. And that's what makes Once Upon a Dance such a fun idea. So Once Upon a Dance creates interactive children's books that combine stories with movement. So these are not just books that your child listens to, they're stories your kid can move through, Think twirling and leaping, imagining, pretending and getting off the couch while still enjoying the benefits of reading. So I didn't grow up doing dance myself. I think anyone who knows me knows that, But I love dance and watching all my girls do dance, it was, it was such a formative experience for them. Dance helped them build confidence and creativity. It taught them the value of practice, perseverance and showing up. And I love that Once Upon a Dance brings those same ideas into a story time format that families can enjoy at home. So the books feature Ballerina Kay as a Gentle Guide and a Positive Role Model, and they're created by a former dance teacher. The stories include themes like friendship, family, empathy, kindness, self acceptance and courage, all wrapped into whimsical adventures that kids can move along with. So if you're looking for something screen free, active and imaginative for your toddler, preschooler, or older child, Once Upon a Dance is a really sweet option. Swap screen time for a connection. Get your kids off the couch and into a story. Jump twirl and leap over to Once Upon a Dance dot com or find Once Upon a Dance books wherever you buy books online. That's Once Upon a Dance dot com.

Whisker (1m 39s):
Today's episode is sponsored by Whisker makers of the Litter Robot, the self-cleaning litter box that helps take one more chore off your family's to-do list. I feel like the mental load of running a household is especially intense this time of year, right? There's school schedules and sports practices, got daycare bags and groceries and meal prep and laundry. And if you have a baby who's eating solid foods, you're also wiping the high chair and wiping the baby and wiping the floor and then somehow cleaning the baby again. And if you're a cat parent, no matter how busy your day has been, your cat still deserves fresh litter. Honestly, the Litter Box has always been the thing that made me hesitant about cats. It's not the cat, it's the litter, the scooping, and the smell. Because when you're already managing a busy household and a baby, do you really need another daily chore? That's why Litter Robot by Whisker makes so much sense for busy families. It automatically cycles after every use. So you can check daily litter scooping off of your to-do list. Literate robot handles the dirty work, which means less time and mental energy that you spend thinking about litter box maintenance and cleanup. And the Whisker app can notify you about your unit, including completed clean cycles, litter and drawer levels. And when your litter robot needs attention, you can also track its daily usage. You can get the stats, you can get weight information, and you get all of this without having to check in every day day. I love anything that takes a repetitive household chair wear and basically handles it in the background for me. So whether you've got one cat or five cats, Whisker has a litter robot for different family sizes plus bundles that make it really easy to get fully set up while saving money. Learn more about Whisker litter robot models and starter kits today. Get 10% off a Whisker litter robot at Whisker dot com slash weaning. That's 10% off at Whisker dot com slash weaning.

Gill Rapley (3m 32s):
Baby led weaning is about trusting baby. Actually, we all eat pureed food, We cure it in our mouth with our teeth or our gums, and babies can do exactly that and that's what they're practicing in the beginning stages of baby Led Weaning.

Katie Ferraro (3m 47s):
Hey there, I'm Katie Ferraro, Registered Dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning. Here on the baby led weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. What if all of the baby Led Weaning rules that you've heard about over and over again aren't actually rules at all? Like do you really need to start with just one new food at a time or do you have to wait three to five days between food? Does baby led weaning mean totally skipping purees, right?

Katie Ferraro (4m 29s):
There's so much information out there about starting solid foods. It can be really hard to separate what baby led weaning actually is from what has simply been repeated enough times that everyone in the universe just assumes it must be true. That's exactly why I wanted to bring this interview back for you today we're talking to Dr. Jill Rapley. She's the co-author of the original baby led weaning book, baby led Weaning The Essential Guide. She is the pioneer of the baby led weaning movement. Jill's work is foundational to so much of what we understand about allowing babies to safely learn how to eat. And I for one, always love hearing her explain in her own words what baby led weaning is and just as importantly what it is not.

Katie Ferraro (5m 15s):
There are so many people out there who aren't even familiar with Gill Rapley and her work. They haven't read the Baby led weaning book. And I feel like if you don't really understand the underlying philosophy about baby led weaning, it's hard to practice it properly. So this conversation we recorded a while back, but the message is still so incredibly powerful and relevant for parents starting solid foods today. I do highly recommend that you read Jill Rapp Lee's original baby led weaning book. I'm gonna link to it in this show notes wherever you're listening to or watching this. She, as I mentioned, is the founding philosopher of the baby led weaning movement, the lady that started it all. She's always so gracious with her time and I think she's got such a great way of debunking a lot of these myths that we've heard about.

Katie Ferraro (6m 0s):
And so with no further ado, here is Gill Rapley.

Gill Rapley (6m 8s):
I'm really excited to be back with you Katie.

Katie Ferraro (6m 10s):
So Gill, as the co-author of the original baby led weaning book and the founding philosopher of Baby Led Weaning, I've already given you a huge introduction and I'm pretty sure most people know who you are. But could you just give us a quick background on how did you get involved in baby Led Weaning and come to create this incredible movement?

Gill Rapley (6m 26s):
Well, it kind of goes back to my days as a health visitor. Health visitors don't exist in every country, but essentially it's a little like a pediatric nurse, although in the UK a health visitor undertakes a lot of the checks and surveillance and immunizations and so on that other places have their pediatricians do. So I basically saw a lot of babies, gave a lot of information and suggestions about feeding and dealt with a lot of issues with parents. And I just found that the introduction of solid foods seemed to cause so much difficulty and worry so often. And parents were talking about the fact that their baby didn't like certain foods.

Gill Rapley (7m 6s):
But actually when I watched these babies, I thought, this isn't about the food. This is the baby not liking what's being done to him. He doesn't like being fed, he doesn't like having something poked into his mouth. And when the recommended minimum age for so feeding changed from four months to six months, that was the chance to say, Hey, hang on a minute. At this age these babies can pick food up and take it to their mouth and cells, why would we need to spoon feed them? Why would we need to purate when they're beginning to be able to chew? And so the concept that a baby could lead the way with the introduction of solids was born and I started speaking about it and it kind of took off

Katie Ferraro (7m 43s):
And the rest is history as they say, right?

Gill Rapley (7m 46s):
The rest is history.

Katie Ferraro (7m 47s):
Well, one thing I think is as a mom myself when I was going and setting out to learn about baby led weaning is that there, there's so many confusing points, so many myths I guess you could say. And so one thing I've always wanted to do is ask you the co-author of the original Baby led weaning book, the Baby led Weaning Guru, I wanna go through a list of some of these myths and just pick your brain like from your own mouth, how do you feel about them? So we've been chatting back and forth about the myths because narrowing them down to a reasonable number has been a little bit challenging. But I think we'll break it up into the legacy myths like the ones that have been around for a long time and then some of the more recent, but certainly current myths about baby led weaning.

Katie Ferraro (8m 29s):
The first myth I wanna ask you about Jill is when I hear all the time from parents and they'll say, I need to start out with one meal a day and gradually work my way up to three meals a day.

Gill Rapley (8m 39s):
Yeah, that works for me. The the ones that I like to call the legacy ones are they're actually still around. But the point is that date, back to before baby led weaning was being spoken about. So for example, the idea that you should start with one meal a day and work a cup gradually to three meals a day, that just rests on the idea that it's all about nutrition and the food getting into the baby. These things date from when food was being introduced to babies who we now know were too young to have it anyway, four months is too young, they don't need it then and they aren't really developmentally ready to cope with it. But it also dates back to an approach where the parent was the one in charge, the parent was putting the food into the baby.

Gill Rapley (9m 20s):
And if we're gonna be the ones making the decisions, then we have to be absolutely sure the baby's ready. And we have to take a very gradual approach. So starting with one meal a day and building up gradually to three made sense when the parent was the one trying to get a certain number of teaspoonful of food into the baby at any one meal. When we do baby Led Weaning where babies are just presented with food to pick up and explore and squish and lick and sniff and so on, and maybe eat, then they're the ones in charge. So whether we offered them the opportunity to do that once a day, three times a day or five times a day, it doesn't really matter if we think of it in terms of playing and learning about their world, well would we say to parents, okay, when you get a new toy for your baby, you must only give it to him once a day initially, and then gradually you build up till eventually he's allowed to play with it three times a day.

Gill Rapley (10m 12s):
That would be complete nonsense.

Katie Ferraro (10m 14s):
One thing I always worry about for new parents though, is that it can seem so overwhelming this transition to solid foods. And I don't want them to think that, okay, we have to disrupt the entire schedule now and have three set meals. So I sometimes suggest a gradual buildup just as a way to work. This idea of a change in your baby's schedule, is that an appropriate recommendation for parents who are feeling overwhelmed by the idea of having to introduce solid foods? How do you respond to that pain point for parents?

Gill Rapley (10m 42s):
I don't think that's inappropriate and I think that can work for some people. But I think if we get away from the idea that this is about the baby eating, then that actually releases us from a lot of the worry. So the baby at six months is gonna carry on having his or her formula feeds, breast feeds, whatever, just the same way as they have been. And all we're doing is inviting them to share our meal times as well. So these are not the baby's meals, this is about the baby sharing what we are doing. And a lot of them are already showing an interest anyway. And many parents have their baby sat up while they're eating a meal with them. All they're doing now is offering a little bit of food, which is suitable for a baby to let them have a go with it. So it's only, I think, overwhelming if we think of it as this whole start of something new like the, you know, the edge of something that we can't go back from when all we're really doing is inviting the baby to share.

Gill Rapley (11m 34s):
And by the same token, just because we've started and we may have done it once or twice on the first day, if we then skip a day, it doesn't matter because the baby's not relying on this for food. So actually if I think if we present it like that, hopefully there won't be too much pressure.

Katie Ferraro (11m 50s):
Jill, what do you think about this idea that babies must be able to swallow food and pass what some people call the tongue thrust reflex test to qualify as being ready to eat, like this rather prescriptive notion that there's a test about the tongue thrust reflux. What do you think about that?

Gill Rapley (12m 8s):
I really struggle with that one because again, it relates back to a time when we were giving food to babies from four months and sometimes even younger. And at that stage, a lot of babies do still have this reflex to push food out of their mouth by six months. It's almost always gone anyway, except perhaps in developmentally challenged babies who in any case will have an adapted approach to their solid food introduction. For the typical baby, there is no issue about a sun frost at six months. It's gone, it's been and gone. And so there's no need to complicate things with that. The other reason that that one worries me is because we have to test for it, as you say, and how do we do that?

Gill Rapley (12m 49s):
Except by putting food into a baby's mouth. Well, baby led weaning says you don't need to do that, you shouldn't be doing that. So the test itself is at odds. The idea of testing is odds with baby led weaning. The other thing that accompanies that in the UK anyway is that the baby needs to be able to swallow the food, otherwise they're not ready, not ready for what. There are plenty of babies who are absolutely ready to start handling food to pick it up, munch on it, throw it around, you know, squish it and whatever. They're absolutely ready to do that. And when they're ready to swallow it, they will swallow it. We don't have to test for that before we allow them to play with it. We don't have to test that a child can pass grade four piano exam before we let him play on the keys.

Gill Rapley (13m 30s):
You know, it's all around the parents being in control that that mindset and we need to get rid of that. The other thing that I have an issue with over the tongue fu reflex is that I've had quite a lot of parents when they've introduced their baby to solid food from around six months, one of the things the baby will do is pick up the food and sniff it and lick it and seeing the baby sticking his tongue out to lick the food, they said, oh my god, we've made a mistake. He's not ready. This is the tongue frost. No it's not the tongue frost went a couple of months ago. This is your baby licking food. And of course it's fine. So I think it just complicates things unnecessarily. It's completely irrelevant at six months to typical babies and not something that people worry about.

Katie Ferraro (14m 11s):
So I know personally, this next myth is one that gets under my skin because I hear it every single day. I teach a hundred First Foods approach where we introduce five new foods at a minimum a week to a baby, and parents inevitably will say, but I've heard, or my pediatrician says, we need to introduce only one new food at a time and wait three to five days between foods. How do you feel about this statement?

Gill Rapley (14m 35s):
I think you know what I'm gonna say by now, this one relates again two, and we were giving babies food when they were really too young to have it when their systems were very immature. So yeah, you would want to be cautious and especially if the parent is the one deciding how much to give and which food it should be. So we're gonna be careful under those circumstances. Not to overload a baby's system, but apart from families where there's a strong history of allergy and babies who may need particular care with allergenic foods in general, we shouldn't have to take that cautious approach. Babies are cautious enough, they pick up a new food, they don't just stuff it straight in, they lick it, they sniff it, they look at it, they take care and they certainly don't swallow huge quantities right off the bat.

Gill Rapley (15m 18s):
So there's no need to wait for three days to watch for a reaction in a baby of of six months old. Even the idea of one food at a time, you know, that's a fairly boring way to start. Why not put two or three different colored foods on the baby's tray so that he actually has an opportunity to compare them and and make discoveries about texture differences and so on. That's so much more fun. Plus there's almost, there's much greater chance that one of them will be to his liking and he might actually wanna eat it.

Katie Ferraro (15m 46s):
Absolutely. And I think parents are so fearful. I know we both experiences, you've heard parents their concerns about allergenic foods and allergic reactions and if we remind them that an allergic reaction to a food, although it's also very rare if it is going to occur, is going to happen within minutes and certainly not any longer than up to two hours after the falling of the ingestion of that potentially allergenic food. It's not like you eat a strawberry and three days later the diaper looks different and you're like, oh my gosh, this is a reaction to the strawberry. It just doesn't work like that for a baby who's six months of age plus showing the other signs of readiness to feet, we're being unnecessarily cautious and building in these huge gaps between foods, which is taking away the baby's ability to achieve that diet diversity that all of the research shows us our babies need.

Gill Rapley (16m 30s):
Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The other thing that bugs me about things like this that parents get told early on is that no one tells them when they can stop doing that. As one mom said to me, if I'm gonna wait three days between every food, he's gonna be 18 before he, I've introduced all the foods I want him to eat. So it's just one of those crazy things, instructions that we give to parents, I think to make life more difficult. No wonder they feel so overwhelmed when they have so many rules to follow. And I

Katie Ferraro (16m 56s):
Don't know if in the UK it's the same, but in the United States, I mean I love and respect our pediatricians and so many of them do such wonderful work. But the American Academy of Pediatrics in their manual for nutrition for pediatrics says, wait a few days between introducing new foods. And so pediatricians are the ones perpetuating this myth. Although there is absolutely no research that shows we need to be waiting quite the opposite. All of the research shows a greater variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures early and often is what we want. And yet we're teaching our pediatricians in this country to teach parents wait a few days. So it's no wonder that the parents come back to the feeding experts and say, but I thought I was supposed to wait three to five days. So we do have certainly that problem as far as at least in medical education here.

Katie Ferraro (17m 38s):
Is it the same in the uk?

Gill Rapley (17m 40s):
It's similar except that as I say, pediatricians don't tend to see healthy well babies, they, they are maybe refer to them when there's a problem are community pediatricians who may do some routine developmental surveillance, but even they rarely get into the issues of feeding that's done by the health visitors. And for the most part, I think the health visitors are fairly clued up in the UK and they are giving kind of Up To Date information. But you're right in the minds of so many professionals, nevermind parents and grandparents, they still have this sense that there's a baby at four months that they're talking about without realizing that a baby is six months is time and a half the age of that one and has certainly matured so much more. It's just a different child.

Katie Ferraro (18m 21s):
Okay, so Jill, the next legacy myth is, and I think this is such a confusing one for parents, they think that the First Foods should be cut in very small pieces. The notion being if I cut it up super small, there's no way the baby can choke on it. What's wrong with that statement?

Gill Rapley (18m 37s):
Well, if we are looking at babies feeding themselves at six months, a baby can't pick up a very small piece of food. He needs a decent chunk that he can wrap his fist around and it needs to stick outta the top of his fist so he can munch it. Again, this goes back to our experience of starting with thin purees and then gradually thicker and then mashed food with a few lumps and eventually small chopped pieces. Really baby led weaning does it completely the other way around the small pieces will come when the baby's dexterity has reached that level or he manages a spoon or a for incidentally, I hear from colleagues in the speech and language therapy world that they're encountering babies who are on tour for an extended amount of time and then are given cho small pieces perhaps because the parents are very frightened of choking.

Gill Rapley (19m 23s):
And what happens is those kids don't chew at all. They're just so used to swallowing everything without chewing that they, they do that with these pieces of food. Now that surely must be a risk of choking and yet of course that's exactly what the parents have been trying to avoid. So baby led weaning, we start big and we work smaller according to the dexterity of the baby.

Katie Ferraro (19m 42s):
And certainly if you look at Amy Brown's research regarding choking risk, we know that the babies at the greater risk of choking are those who are introduced or allowed to eat finger foods the least frequently. So parents sometimes think, oh, I'm doing my baby a favor by not allowing them to pick up these foods on, I'm controlling everything. But actually you're potentially increasing choking risk because baby needs that experience to practice. But as you, you know, so correctly point out it's the baby that should be the one driving that action and not the parents

Gill Rapley (20m 9s):
And parents get worried when a baby will put a big piece of food in into his mouth and then gag on it. And the gag reflex is very sensitive. That's six to eight months and gradually becomes less sensitive as the baby gets older. But actually waiting until that gag reflex has become less sensitive is not doing the baby any favors either. He needs to have that reflex triggered when the food is not way back in his mouth in order to learn how not to stuff his mouth full. In my days as the health is, I often saw babies who were not allowed to feed themselves for the first few months when eventually they were at say eight, nine months. They would just stuff their mouths. They had no idea that anything was supposed to happen in between the food going in and it being swallowed and they would fill their mouths like a little hamster 'cause there wasn't, the gag fix wasn't sensitive enough to stop them doing that.

Gill Rapley (20m 55s):
And plus that's another argument for the large pieces. If a baby pokes a piece of food into his mouth and gags on it, he just pulls it out again, no problem. Whereas little pieces can really get caught in, in all the, the crevices and in the throat, but they'll come to those later by which time his oral skills would've improved. So we should be definitely leaving those smaller pieces till later on.

Katie Ferraro (21m 15s):
Now our final legacy myth before we move into the current ones, this is what I was laughing about yesterday. I know we had been chatting back and forth about these and I'm actually studying for this big pediatric nutrition certification exam here in the US and I was reading the study materials, and you can't help but laugh out loud if you do infant feeding every day, is that it said that fruits and vegetables are the ideal starter foods for babies. Why do you disagree with that statement, Jill?

Gill Rapley (21m 39s):
Well, yet again, this goes back to when we were starting much earlier, babies of around four months seemed to do better on fruits and vegetables and then gradually work up to including meat and eggs and fish and so on probably from around about six months. So that the, the legacy that we are left with is that somehow meat and fish and eggs and protein foods shouldn't be introduced until two months after they've started solids, when actually it wasn't anything to do with the timing of starting, it was to do with the age of the baby at six months. The most likely nutrients babies are going to be short of, if any, are iron and zinc. And those are found most plentifully in proteins of animal origin.

Gill Rapley (22m 21s):
So meat, fish, eggs, so on, but also in in lentils and pulses and and other vegetarian foods. So those should be the ones that we focus on. And anecdotally, I hear often from parents that those are the foods that children seem to gravitate towards in the early weeks of baby led weaning and not particularly the vegetables and certainly not the fruits. So it's kind of all turned around because we are looking at what the baby might actually need at that age, not at which of the most easy ones to introduce if you're going to fur them on a spoon.

Katie Ferraro (22m 52s):
Certainly, and I know for parents, if they're aware of the emerging research that really supports the notion of introducing allergenic foods earlier and more often, if you look at those foods, especially here in the United States, we have the big eight allergenic foods. Sesame was just added, these foods are primarily protein foods. Half of the big eight foods of animal origin. So parents I think are starting to get the message that these animal foods, if the family does eat animal foods, it's important to be incorporating the foods the rest of your family eats. I mean, I know me, I don't sit down and eat avocado, banana and sweet potato day in and day out two and three times a day. The point of baby led weaning is to eventually be allowed to have your child participate in the meals with you.

Katie Ferraro (23m 32s):
So I always encourage parents to try to make that reflective of the meals you're eating. And it probably has something besides fruit and vegetables in it, right?

Gill Rapley (23m 38s):
Yeah, absolutely. There's nothing wrong with fruits and vegetables, but there's, there's absolutely no need to feel that You have to start with those before the baby can progress. Again, we're talking about a six month old baby, they've got a robust digestive system and they're really interested in all sorts of foods and those are the ones that they're actually gonna need most likely.

Hungry Root (23m 56s):
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Katie Ferraro (25m 57s):
Can I ask you as kind of a side myth off of this notion that we start with fruits and vegetables, parents sometimes worry that they can't feed their babies fruit. They'll say, well, I've heard if I introduce fruit before vegetables, it will cause my baby to have an affinity for sweet foods. And so then they are, they're fearful of offering fruits, which of course we don't want either. But could you speak to that notion about fruits before vegetables not being a good thing? 'cause that's certainly something that's still taught in the United States, even though it's incorrect.

Gill Rapley (26m 22s):
Yeah, that's also taught in the UK that the General Frost now seems to be vegetables first. And I can see that that that makes a lot of sense. Babies perhaps inclined to have a sweet tooth, but again, why offer just one food? Why not offer, you know, a strawberry alongside a green bean? What difference does that make? Babies make choices in the end, the adult is in control of what the baby gets offered and the baby chooses from amongst them. But to restrict them unnecessarily and and not offer fruit seems unfortunate. I think part of the problem is that in our heads we see fruit as dessert and you have to kind of earn dessert. You have to eat your greens or your meat first, and then you're allowed to have something sweet. If we can get away from adding that layer of emotion onto our foods and just let them be food, then babies can choose.

Gill Rapley (27m 10s):
But again, if we're offering, if we're not restricting babies to one food every three days, then we don't run into that problem and from only having fruits for the first six weeks because we're actually gonna expose them to more foods

Katie Ferraro (27m 23s):
And later on, as the baby gets older and all babies will experience some degree of picky eating, generally starting in the second year of life, you sometimes your parents say, oh, my baby only wants fruit. And I kindly remind them, if you're only offering them fruit, your baby will only eat fruit. And it certainly is easier to peel a banana and put it out on the plate, then perhaps to prepare some Brussels sprouts in a way that's safe for the baby to eat. So sometimes there is education, I think needed on the part of the parents to try to offer as many vegetable exposures as fruits, or at least be cognizant of that so you don't get in the habit of only offering fruit to your baby.

Gill Rapley (27m 53s):
Yeah.

Katie Ferraro (27m 54s):
So can we switch gears now and talk a little bit about some of the more current baby-led, led weaning myths of, we have five of these that I wanted to ask you about. Starting with this notion that, you know, is there a set amount of time, some parents will say, I've heard that babies need to be able to sit for X amount of minutes or seconds unsupported in order to qualify as being ready to eat. What do you think about putting a time limit on how long babies should be able to sit by themselves before they're allowed to eat food?

Gill Rapley (28m 21s):
I don't actually know where this notion came from, but it's certainly very common out there on the web and in social media, I guess it's a safety measure someone has introduced just to kind of be on the safe side. But the fact is that actually most babies can't sit without any support for any length of time until they're more like seven and a half, eight months, you know, sitting in the middle of the floor, for example, that it's not common for babies of six months to be able to do that. The criterion we are looking for is can that baby sit and hold his head and his trunk stably upright so that he can eat safely? And is he stable enough that if he reaches forward or reaches sideways for a piece of food, he's not gonna fall over or slump forward or whatever.

Gill Rapley (29m 4s):
So if he leads a little bit of support around his hips to pad out the space in the high chair, for example, in order to achieve that, or if he's sitting on mom or dad's lap just for them to hold him around his diaper, there's nothing wrong with that. That's just providing stability. The point is that he's able to engage with the food in a safe way. Now, contrast that again with a baby of let's say four months, who very, very rarely would a baby a four month be able to hold their head and trunk erect and reach out and grasp something and bring it to their mouth. They would be turning to slump sideways or forwards. So they're clearly not ready to engage with food in any meaningful or safe way, but most babies are at six months and it doesn't matter if they can't sit alone for any particular length of time.

Katie Ferraro (29m 48s):
Okay, Jill, now what about this idea that babies learn to chew before they learn to swallow? I can't even say it with a straight face, but could you tell me your thoughts on that one? Yeah,

Gill Rapley (29m 57s):
This is another one I I hear quite often. So excuse me. How did a baby get to six months without being able to swallow? Clearly they can swallow. The point that's really being made is that they, and, and I also struggle with the word learn in this context, babies don't really learn to chew. They become able to chew from about six months. They spontaneously are making chewing movements. Now sure they get more skilled at it. So one could argue in that sense they're learning, but they're really just perfecting and developing something which is a natural developmental skill. Contrast it actually with learning to eat off a spoon, which is very much a learned behavior because it's something that's required by the task at hand.

Gill Rapley (30m 40s):
Developmental skills develop in response to an environment that is conducive. They're not required in any way because the baby develops them spontaneously. So what happens in chewing and swallowing is that from my observations and from what I've read, it seems that babies from about six months are making chewing movements and beginning to move food around in their mouth. But very commonly that food falls out because what they can't do, create a bolus of food and move that towards the back of the throat purposefully in order to swallow it so they can swallow, sure. But what they can't easily do is get the food to the back of the throat and then swallow it so often it will fall out.

Gill Rapley (31m 22s):
And that's perfectly normal. And that makes absolute sense. It makes complete sense that a baby would be able to chew food up before he tries to swallow it. And if he's not very good at chewing yet and it falls out, well that's great because that allows him more practice. So a better way to describe it is that the chewing abilities for the ability to form a bolus and move that to the back of the throat.

Katie Ferraro (31m 44s):
Now Jill, this is one of my favorite questions to ask you because I love when people put words in your mouth and I'm sure you don't love that, but you know as much as anyone that there are so many people who say baby led weaning means no pure and no spoons. And If your baby has a puree or has a spoon, they're not doing baby led weaning. True or false?

Gill Rapley (32m 4s):
False, but with a caveat. So any of that goes as long as it's in the hands of the baby. What we don't do is puree all babies' food and give it to them in that format. And neither do we spoon it into their mouth for them. They can experience it themselves. Babies will learn to use a spoon initially just to dip into something or to be given to them preloaded with something. They can manage that and they can also absolutely eat purees. There are quite a lot of foods that we enjoy as puree or that kind of come ready puree like yogurt or whatever. So there's no reason why they can't have those foods, it's just just that they don't need them spooned into them by an adult. So it's spoonfeeding that it's not part of baby led weaning and the idea of offering all foods as purees, but within the variety and within the baby led and the, and the self-feeding approach, then both of those things are absolutely fine.

Katie Ferraro (32m 57s):
And one thing you've said, I remember we were chatting once was someone brought it to your attention, I love this, that there's no foods that are naturally pureed. I said, well what about yogurt? Well, yogurt technically comes from cow's milk. What about applesauce? Well, it used to be apples. And it's kind of an interesting thought. Like if we look at, you know, historically and from a, you know, a biological standpoint, there are really no pureed foods that naturally exist.

Gill Rapley (33m 19s):
Yeah, absolutely. So the only way babies would come to them in babyhood is if they're pureed for them and then, and then offer it to them. So yeah, but I like eating apple sauce. I like eating yogurt, so, and I generally use a spoon to do it with.

Katie Ferraro (33m 32s):
Exactly. But there are other foods you eat. That's why I always, always say parent, you know, purees are an important texture for your baby to master. They're just not the only texture your baby can eat. And certainly within the first few days you should be doing a variety of different textures 'cause your baby wants to and can experience and enjoy those. One

Gill Rapley (33m 49s):
Of the things that I know has been queried is actually how easy purees are to eat if you try to chew them. And babies of six months seem spontaneously to wanna munch on foods instead of just sort of slurping it, which is really just an extension of drinking, which is what very young babies do with purees. I, I dunno if you've ever tried putting a puree in your mouth and then applying a chewing movement, it's absolutely impossible to manage it. It just splurges all over the inside of your mouth. And certainly you can't gather it together and swallow it easily. Whereas foods that require chewing seem to be what babies, not very hard foods soft enough to chew, but they're what babies seem best able to manage at six months.

Gill Rapley (34m 30s):
So if anything, I think the purees come later rather than first actually, we all eat pureed food. Okay, We cure it in our mouth with our teeth or our gums. And babies can do exactly that. And that's what they're practicing in the beginning stages of baby led weaning is how to get food into a smooth enough consistency, then make it into a bolus, take it to the back of the mouth and swallow it. And they need lots of chances to practice that. Back to that whole one, one meal a day thing. Why restrict their chances to practice this wonderful new skill if they're getting ready for walking? Do you limit them to once a day to practice this new skill? Absolutely not. So we need to get away from the whole idea about this being about eating and instead look at it as exploring and learning.

Katie Ferraro (35m 16s):
Jill, what about the biggest fear for parents when they're starting solid foods is the fear of choking. I mean, rightly so, babies only ever had breast milk or formula in their mouth, and now we're expecting them to know what to do with these different textured foods. Could you speak to the notion that parents ask about, which is, Does baby led weaning increase the risk of choking? Or they'll say, pediatricians do it all the time here in the us Oh, I, I don't recommend baby Led Weaning because it increases the risk of choking.

Gill Rapley (35m 40s):
There's absolutely no evidence of that. If anything, it's the opposite. As you mentioned earlier, there have been studies which show that there's either no increased risk of choking or possibly a, a reduced risk of choking. Again, we have to think about these babies who are so used to swallowing the minute something appears in their mouth. Those are the babies in my view that are at risk of choking. Especially if we then add the small pieces into the mix. You can see how all of these myths kind of come together as one huge one really about the way babies eat. And in fact, babies who are allowed to explore food in their own time, spend a lot more time studying food, trying it out, chewing it in the front of their mouth, letting it fall out. They don't just shovel it in and expect to swallow it.

Gill Rapley (36m 22s):
I think part of the reason we have this idea that babies are more at risk of choking if they're eating pieces of food, is because that's what we've seen with babies who have been raised on purees. If we take purees and spoonfeeding outta the mix, I really think we need to investigate what the process of the development of oral skills looks like without spoonfeeding and purees in there. What we're training our babies to do is to take something off a spoon in a completely different way from what they would take it from their hand or from a fork using their lips and sort of sucking it in and then pretty much swallowing it instantly. And then they try and transfer that those actions to something solid or small pieces.

Gill Rapley (37m 4s):
Well, of course there's a risk of choking, but if we didn't subject them to that learning in the first place, it can look completely different.

Katie Ferraro (37m 11s):
It reminds me of something that Amy Brown always says, which is, if we're looking at the way baby Led Weaning studies should be designed, baby Led Weaning should not be the intervention spoonfeeding of purees, which is an incredibly unnatural experience. That should be the intervention that we're comparing against the control, which is just letting babies eat food when they're ready. And we have to go through this whole rigmarole to prove that baby Led Weaning is safe. And perhaps we should be proving that Traditional Spoon feeding of purees is what's unsafe.

Gill Rapley (37m 37s):
Absolutely. Yeah. We need to turn the whole thing around and recognize what is the, as you say, the intervention or the new practice in all of this. And it's not baby led weaning that's as old as the hills. And as one eminent researcher said to me once, if it was dangerous, we'd know by now, you know, it's actually been going on forever. And there are so many grandparents and great-grandparents who say, well, actually that's what I did. And I, I challenge myself when I'm asked by health professionals at home, where's your evidence? I say, well, where's yours? Excuse me. You know, for the spoon feeding and the purees that you're doing, that's not evidence based. But I also ask them to just have a word with people who have, let's say, three or more children, because they did baby led weaning.

Gill Rapley (38m 18s):
They couldn't be doing with all the purees and spoons by the time they got to their third or their fourth or whatever. And they say, yeah, just let him do it himself. And as this researcher said to me, we'd know by now if that was dangerous. It ain't, it's safe.

Katie Ferraro (38m 32s):
Now, Jill, I'm interested to know your thoughts on this one because I'm seeing more and more people talking about, well, I don't really wanna do baby led weaning, but I really don't like the idea of spoonfeeding, so I'm gonna do a combination. So what do you think about this notion of can you successfully combine traditional parent-led spoonfeeding with baby led weaning? Is that a thing? The

Gill Rapley (38m 51s):
Short answer is no, but it's important to explain that because a lot of people, as you say pragmatically, they find they want to do a mixture of methods, but what they're doing is combining two methods. They're doing some spoon feeding and some the baby feeds himself, and that's absolutely fine if that works for them. But the point is, that's not baby led weaning because it's not truly baby led. The important thing to grasp, I guess, is that baby led weaning is an approach. So first of all, it doesn't just rely on self-feeding, it's all also about offering healthy food, sharing meal times, letting the baby decide when he's had enough or what he wants to eat in what order. So it's not just the difference between spoonfeeding and self-feeding, but that's what it gets narrowed down to quite often when it's spoken about in the media or in social media.

Gill Rapley (39m 38s):
But if people wanna combine self-feeding with spoonfeeding, fine as far as it goes. But I guess if I'm, if I take it back to the kind of bare minimum, baby led wing is about trusting babies. Parent led weaning is about not quite trusting babies. You can't really trust your baby one minute and then not not the next, or trust him at one meal and not at the next one or trust him one day and not the next day. So in that sense, you can't combine two approaches, but you can combine two methods. It's important though that I think we realize we have to be careful about what we call it. In that case, if we want research to tell us whether baby led weaning is a good thing or not, then we need to be clear what what baby led weaning is and define it appropriately.

Gill Rapley (40m 20s):
We don't have clear definitions, then we can't do good quality research, so we'll never have those answers. So that's why I'm a little bit of a pedant when it comes to what we call baby Led Weaning. If you go onto the web and social media accounts and so on, what one person describes and calls baby Led Weaning is not the same as what another person describes when they define baby Led Weaning. So for research purposes, we do have to be a little bit clear, and also because people are learning from each other on the web, and so I'd rather they knew actually what baby dead weaning means before they decide whether they're going to go with that or not go with that,

Katie Ferraro (40m 55s):
Which is exactly why I'm so excited that we could have this conversation.

Gill Rapley (40m 59s):
Yeah, I think one other useful point about combining or what people think of as combining Traditional Spoon feeding with baby led weaning is that actually nobody's really described what Traditional Spoon feeding looks like if you start at six months. Because when we were starting at four months or younger way back then, what we were doing was, was starting with the purees, but actually parents were advised to start introducing finger foods and let the baby begin to feed himself from around six months. So the fact of giving finger foods doesn't make make it baby led weaning. That's actually still Traditional Spoon feeding. It's just that at some point you are always gonna move over to not only spoonfeeding that child.

Gill Rapley (41m 43s):
So what so many people are describing when they're saying they're doing a bit of both is actually just Traditional Spoon feeding the way it would normally progress. The point of baby led weaning is that it's baby led from the beginning and that's what makes it different.

Katie Ferraro (41m 57s):
Well, Jill, thank you so much for sharing your insight and your thoughts for all of these myths, because I think it is so important to hear it directly from your mouth like this is your interpretation, also based on the research, based on your experience, and for our audience members who wanna learn more about your philosophy to the approach of baby led weaning, where do you suggest they go to find your resources?

Gill Rapley (42m 19s):
Well, would have to say the books that I've written with Tracy Mer, I do have a website. I'm in the process of trying to update it and produce a better one, but I'm not very tech savvy and actually it's not my forte. So that's gonna take a little while. By all means, look on social media, share ideas with other, other people, but if you could come back to our books for the low down on actually what baby led weaning looks like and what it means, then I think that would be helpful. And then we all know what we're talking about instead of getting these distortions that go as messages go from mouth to mouth.

Katie Ferraro (42m 55s):
Well, thank you so much for your time. It was wonderful chatting with you again.

Gill Rapley (42m 58s):
Thank you, Katie. It's really great to be back with you.

Katie Ferraro (43m 1s):
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that interview with Gill Rapley. I love any opportunity to pick her brain and hear her speak in her own words, especially to talk about some of the myths that are out there about baby led weaning. Check out her book, it's in the description. I know her work has been so foundational to my work. I write her book cover to cover when I was starting Solid Foods with my babies. There was so many great materials out there about what baby led weaning is. I know I personally struggled with how to do it though on a day-to-day basis. That's why I created My program, Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro. It's the original hundred First Foods approach. So if you wanna step by step blueprint on which food to make for your baby on which day and how to do it safely, check out the program at baby led weaning dot co slash program.

Katie Ferraro (43m 48s):
There's a discount code for $50 off to join wherever you're listening to or watching this.

Airwave Media (43m 52s):
And thank you again to Gill for being the pioneer in this field and for taking the time to answer all of these questions and debunk some of these myths, especially thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you like podcasts that feature food and science in using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from AirWave Media. We're online@blwpodcast.com. Thanks for listening, guys. I'll see you next time.

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