Everything You Need to Know About Baby-Led Weaning: A Safe Approach to Starting Solid Foods

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Safety is so important when your baby is starting solid foods and there are so many parents out there who are terrified that their baby is going to choke on food. Choking is a rare but real risk and knowing infant CPR can save your baby's life. I recommend that all parents and caregivers take an infant refresher CPR course before they start solid foods. This week is Choking Awareness Day and right now you can get the online CPR course that I recommend and that I take myself each quarter for free when you register for my Choking Prevention and Response Course. The Choking Prevention and Response Course, I co-teach this with Dawn Winkelman. She's a speech language pathologist and pediatric swallowing expert and we also teach it alongside Brandon Doerksen who's a certified CPR Specialist.

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So the three of us created this Choking Prevention and Response Course for parents who are particularly anxious about their baby starting solid foods. If you wanna know everything that's going on with your baby with regards to safe swallowing before you even get started on finger foods, this course is for you and you can get that online CPR course for free when you register for The Choking Prevention and Response Course now through April 1st. To get started, go to this website it's bit.ly/cprchoking, that's b-i-t . -l-y/cprchoking. You don't need any code if you sign up for Choking Prevention and Response anytime now through April 1st. It'll automatically add lifetime access to that online CPR course so you can get over your fear of choking and help your baby make that safe transition to solid foods.

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And this idea of diet diversity and helping our babies eat like a wide variety of foods is so important because there's this notion called the flavor window and it's the short period of time where your baby will like and accept a wide variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures. And you wanna take advantage of that by preparing foods safely and offering the greatest variety possible so that your baby will grow up, learning how to like real food and that you'll actually enjoy the process of having to feed your kid. 'Cause I hate to break it to you you gotta feed this small person for the next 17 and a half years of its life. It's a little bit of work right now, but you're gonna be so glad that you helped your baby. Learn how to safely eat all these foods and yet don't have to force feed them by spoon.

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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. Hello and welcome to the Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro podcast. We are starting at the very beginning today exploring the question, what is Baby-Led Weaning? Now, maybe you're here listening because you have a baby who is about to turn six months old and you're interested in learning about how do you safely start solid foods.

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I know there's others of you who might be listening because maybe you did spoon feeding with an older baby who's now a picky toddler and you've got another baby and you heard about Baby-Led Weaning as a way to prevent picky eating and you wanna learn more. Maybe some of you guys are here 'cause you started with purees, but you want to switch to finger foods no matter what brought you here today. I want to say welcome I am Katie Ferraro, your host. I'm a Registered Dietitian and mom of seven. I specialize in infant feeding and Baby-Led Weaning and this is a totally judgment free space to learn about how to give your baby a safe start to solid foods. In this episode today we're going to cover what Baby-Led Weaning is we're also gonna go through what Baby-Led Weaning is not.

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I'll tell you a little bit about the history of the philosophy and the practice of Baby-Led Weaning. We'll do some comparisons between baby-led weaning and conventional adult-led spoon feeding and then I'll give you some tips and let you on your way so you can start exploring some of the more intricacies about this alternative to conventional or adult-led spoon feeding. I do wanna encourage you to follow the show. If you're not already doing that, just hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening to this podcast. I release two episodes each week, so there's always a mini solo training that I do on Mondays where we'll cover a topic related to infant feeding. And then on Thursdays I release a longer interview episode and that's where I will interview another feeding expert.

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We have people from all over the world, all walks of life teaching about their areas of expertise when it comes to starting solid foods. I like to start each of these mini training episodes with a Baby-Led Weaning tip of the day. And today's tip is that Baby-Led Weaning does not mean skipping purees. Some people who don't understand baby-led weaning will say, "oh yeah, yeah, it's so easy. You just like feed your baby real food and you like totally bypass purees". And that's actually not true. You can honor the self feeding principles of Baby-Led Weaning and still offer naturally pureed foods like unsweetened apple sauce or oatmeal or whole milk yogurt. And if you hang on to the end of this episode, I'm gonna teach you how you can help your baby do that in a baby-led way.

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And I wanna tell you guys a really quick story. When I first heard about Baby-Led Weaning and I had no idea what it was, this was after I'd already struggled a ton with spoon-feeding my oldest, I remember a colleague said, "Well why don't you do Baby-Led Weaning?" And I was like, "Baby linguinie? Like, what are you even talking about?" The name Baby-Led Weaning is certainly not my favorite. I have colleagues and friends who proposed all sorts of alternatives, but it's called Baby-Led weaning. And we're gonna stick with the title and I'm gonna tell you why it's called that in this episode. So let's go ahead and get started with what is Baby-Led Weaning. All right, what is Baby-Led Weaning? It's in alternative to conventional adult-led spoon feeding whereby your baby will learn to feed themselves the age appropriate wholesome foods provided by you, the parent or the caregiver.

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Now you wait until the baby is six months of age to start. We'll talk about why today, your baby learns to be an independent eater. This approach helps reduce picky eating, it does not totally prevent picky eating 'cause picky eating is developmentally appropriate for toddlers, but I'm gonna show you how it makes it way less bad and this approach totally takes the stress out of starting solid foods. Now, what is Baby-Led Weaning by-led weaning not? Okay if you've been hearing the term Baby-Led Weaning, but you're still like me when I started out confused, like, what exactly are we talking about here? It may help to understand what Baby-Led Weaning is not. So as I mentioned, it does not mean skipping purees. Those purees aren't important texture for your baby to eat, it's just not the only texture that your baby can't eat and Baby-Led Weaning it is not some made up thing on the internet.

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Okay? There is a real incredible body of evidence that supports your baby's ability to self-feed from their first bites. Okay? Baby-Led weaning does not increase choking risks. Some people are hesitant to start this approach 'cause they think like, "oh my gosh, those babies are eating real food, they're gonna choke on food". No, they're not. This fear is often rooted in concerns about choking. And it's important to point out that babies who start solid foods with a baby-led approach are at no higher risk of choking than our babies who do conventional adult-led spoon feeding provided that their parents are educated about reducing choking risk and we cover that a lot here on the podcast. And I wanna just let you know that the babies who've had the least amount of experience with finger foods, those are actually the babies that are elevated risk for choking.

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So, we're gonna talk about Baby-Led Weaning eaning as a way to help push your baby past pure and to try out those trickier textures in a way that is safe and developmentally appropriate. I'd like to share now a little about the history of Baby-Led Weaning. Okay. It's been certainly gaining in popularity and notoriety in today's parenting culture. But as a practice, Baby-Led weaning is actually a centuries old approach to letting babies naturally feed themselves. I always ask parents like, what do you think cave mama fed cave baby before there was like that entire aisle full of baby food pouches at the store for you to buy, right? As a practice, Baby-Led Weaning is nothing new. But as far as a parenting term and a feeding philosophy goes, Baby-Led Weaning is relatively new.

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The term baby led weaning was coined by Gill Rapley. She's the pioneer in the champion of this self-feeding philosophy. She's the co-author of the original Baby-Led Weaning book, first published in 2008. most recently updated in 2019. I definitely suggest reading Gill Rapley's book as it's really important for understanding the underlying philosophy behind this movement. Okay? As a dietitian specializing in Baby-Led Weaning, I've had the good fortune to interview Gill a number of times on this podcast. If you go to the website our for our show, blwpodcast.com, and type in Gill Rapley, it's G-I-L-L-R-A-P-L-E-Y. You can find all of the interviews with Gill.

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We actually even made July 1st Baby-Led Weaning day. Our team did that a number of years ago and we put it on July 1st in order to honor Gill Rapley's work, okay? She is the one that started this philosophy and she really stressed the importance of waiting until six months of age when your baby's really developmentally ready to start solid foods. Okay? And so July 1st is if your theoretical baby was born on January 1st, on July 1st is when they would turn six months of age. So that's why we made that National Baby-Led Weaning day. And I just wanna drive home the importance of waiting until your baby is six months of age. Some of you might be here because you're like, oh, we're getting close to that. But don't let anyone pressure you into starting solid foods prior to that.

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Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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So let's talk about the opposite of Baby-Led Weaning, which is adult-led spoon feeding. So adult-led spoon feeding is the opposite of Baby-Led Weaning because the adult is the one pushing the food into the baby's mouth versus with Baby-Led Weaning, the visual there is the baby's the one picking the food up and bringing it to their mouth. Remember when you were watching your baby, like right after they were born and you were probably struggling with breastfeeding or bottle feeding and people were telling you like, "you gotta watch out for your baby's hunger and fullness cues", right?. You were observing for when your baby was full, you noticed, "oh my gosh, the baby's pushing their face away from the bottle or the breast when they're full". That's a responsive feeding method. That's a responsive feeding mechanism. And Baby-Led Weaning is a responsive feeding method as well.

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Okay? Why in the second half of infancy do we traditionally strip away our baby's ability to drive their own food intake and then like arbitrarily force feed different amounts of pureed gook shoving it into their mouth when they clearly don't want it? Okay, that is not a responsive feeding method, okay? We don't want to force feed babies. One of the benefits of Baby-Led Weaning is you avoid those mealtime battles and you don't have to force feed your child. You're helping them establish a foundational love of food. And so this observation that Gill Rapley had, she was a health visitor and she was traveling from house to house and doing checking in on parents and doing a lot of the work in the UK that pediatricians might do in the office here in the United States.

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And what Gill Rapley noticed was that it wasn't the food that babies didn't like when it came to starting solid foods, it was the feeding that was being done to them that she didn't like. And I share that when I started solid foods with my oldest child, I had no idea what Baby-Led weaning was. My baby was just like barely five months old and here I am, first time mom, I just followed my pediatrician's advice and it was like, "Hey, why don't you start her on iron fortified white rice cereal?" Which I did. And it went terribly. You guys, my daughter hated being spoon-fed. She hated everything about food. We even got to the point where mealtimes were a downright battleground. And I was convinced that she not only hated food, but she hated me. So another funny story, it's not actually funny, it's kind of traumatic at this point.

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It was traumatic at the point, it's funny to me now. But when that that oldest baby of mine was refusing anything except her bottle, my mom and my sister invited me to go to a park with my baby around lunchtime. And both my mom and my sister have six kids and I felt like they knew everything about having babies and I knew nothing. And they would just judge me about not being able to get my daughter to eat food. So I remember lying and saying I couldn't go on this park play date. Like not 'cause I couldn't go, but I just didn't wanna go. 'cause I thought like, gosh, I'm gonna be so embarrassed when it's lunchtime and like all the other kids are eating and I don't freaking even know how to feed my baby and they're watching me like try to force feed this baby. So I felt all this shame, like what kind of mom can't feed her own baby? And then you know what kind of dietitian mom at that?

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So at the height of our feeding frustrations with our oldest, my husband Charlie and I found out that we were pregnant with quadruplets. So we'd been doing fertility treatments. I knew the potential for multiples was there, but I was definitely not expecting quadruplets. And I remember the first time I saw our four babies altogether on the ultrasound. Like the initial thought that went through my head was, "How am I ever gonna feed four babies at once when I can't even feed the one baby that I have at home?". So fast forward at 34 weeks, I ended up giving birth to three boys and one girl. They spent the first part of their life in the NICU growing and getting stronger and friends would come and help feed the babies. And I remember just like whining about how much I hated trying to get my older baby at home to eat solid foods.

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And I remember this colleague was there helping and she's like, "Well, why don't you try baby like Baby-Led weaning?" And that's when I was like, "baby ling weaning, like what is this chick talking about?". And she said, "what's this like alternative to conventional spoon feeding where babies learn to feed themselves? You wait until they're six months of age, you make them finger foods, they learn to be an independent eater, it helps reduce picky eating, it totally takes the stress out of starting solid foods". And I was like, yes, please. But, and also like you know things that sound like the answer to your prayers, you're like, "Oh, it's probably too good to be true". But I did have a lot of downtime holding babies, pumping, feeding them there in the NICU. So I threw myself into learning everything that I could about Baby-Led Weaning. 'cause I am one of those people that has to be convinced like that this thing works, right?

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That it's safe, that it's evidence-based. Like I'm not just gonna do some sort of woo-woo flash in the pan parenting trend. And thankfully my job at the time, I was working as a college university nutrition professor, I could really lean on and learn from my colleagues who are infant feeding specialists and researchers. And they were like, "No, this Baby-Led weaning thing is legit". And I came to know this about Baby-Led Weaning, which if I have to define it in five seconds or a 15 minute podcast episode, Baby-Led Weaning is a practical, safe hands-on approach to starting solid food. Baby-Led Weaning is an alternative to conventional or what we sometimes call parent-led spoon feeding and Baby-Led Weaning as a practice, it's a centuries old natural approach to letting babies feed themselves.

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And when people say like what's the number one reason? Like, why have you literally dedicated your whole life now to teaching Baby-Led Weaning? Like this was such a transformational experience for my family. But the best thing about this approach is because Baby-Led Weaning addresses not just what your baby eats, but more importantly how they learn to eat. Okay? Baby-Led weaning is an evidence-based and scientifically supported way to safely start solid foods for many types of babies and all abilities and backgrounds. We've worked with babies, with down syndrome and cleft pellets, lip and tongue and cheek ties, severe eczema, premature babies, babies who are getting a late start to solid food and every other type of baby in between.

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And Baby-Led weaning has benefits for them and for you as the parent or the caregiver. Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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So let's talk about the benefits of Baby-Led Weaning. Okay? So if we're listing out the benefits of this approach, Baby-Led Weaning babies are more equipped to achieve diet diversity. Okay? Diet diversity is possible with this approach because babies learn how to eat a wider variety of foods from their first bites. Okay? Baby-Led Weaning also impacts and reduces the risk of severe picky eating. 'cause you're maximizing the number of foods that are offered during the baby's flavor window. Okay, this is a short period of time where your baby will like and accept a wide variety of foods and flavors and tastes and textures. And I love this approach because our babies are given enough time and space to learn how to eat, to learn how to listen and respond to their own hunger and fullness cues that ties into these theories of responsive feeding and intuitive eating, which babies especially benefit from when we implement this early.

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With Baby-Led Weaning, our babies are poised for lower rates of food allergy down the road because we're introducing a wider variety of allergenic foods early and often. And research shows us that that helps lower food allergy risks down the road. Baby-Led Weaning helps babies establish a healthy relationship with food that they're gonna benefit from or the remainder of their lifespan. So many parents, right? And say like, "I just want my kids to like real food". And a lot of times that's because maybe you as the parent don't have the best relationship with food or a lot of you guys it's like, "Oh, I see the way my brother and sister's kids eat and I would never say this to their face, but like I would like my child to actually like food". And that's another reason why some people explore this. The reality is as adults, a lot of us will readily admit we do not have an ideal relationship with food.

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But we didn't start out that way, okay. For many of us, it was forced on us because our first foray into solid food were being force fed purees oftentimes before we were ready to start solid foods. Okay?,That's the situation we want to avoid, okay. Babies should not learn how to eat by being force fed. Okay, when you look at that picture of the baby pushing the spoon away from their mouth as the parent is trying to force the puree or the cereal in there, look at the dynamic there. Who has the power in that picture? Where is the baby's autonomy in feeding? Why as a culture do we completely strip away and remove our baby's ability and desire to feed themselves when we resort to force feeding? And then we act all surprised when the babies don't like food and turn into toddlers who don't eat anything.

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So as a parent and a dietitian, this certainly felt wrong. And so I made the decision when our quadruplets came time to start solid foods that we were gonna have a remarkably more positive foray into food. Okay, except I had no idea what I was doing with Baby-Led Weaning, okay. I made so many mistakes at the beginning and we struggled a lot with solid foods. 'cause at that time there were no good reliable evidence-based resources about how to do Baby-Led Weaning safely. And it was hard. I felt like giving up. I felt like they were gonna choke. I was like, what if they have a food allergy? Like, but I was not gonna go back to force feeding my babies. So I put my dietitian training to work, did a lot of trial and error mistakes and scary moments and botched recipes.

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But I came up with a feeding framework, which worked wonderfully after a lot of tweaking, okay. I came up with a five step feeding framework and I realized that our babies had eaten a 100 different foods before they turned one, okay. And this Baby-Led Weaning thing was such an empowering and transformative experience for our whole family. I decided to switch the entire emphasis of my nutrition career to focus exclusively on Baby-Led Weaning, which is it how we're here together today. So when our quads were 18 months old, my husband and I were like, "Oh, let's have, we're gonna have one more baby". But we were doing IVF, we had another set of multiple. So we had twins. So I had seven kids, three and under for a while. It was totally chaotic.

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I look back now, I'm like, oh my gosh, how did we do it? But, but we made it. But when the twins were born, I was already teaching Baby-Led Weaning full time. I took this a 100 first foods approach where we get the babies to eat a 100 foods before they turn one. I refined it, I streamlined it based on more research. Then turned this whole like proprietary five step feeding framework that I'll be sharing with you here on the podcast and the 100 First Foods approach. Put it into a digital platform that over the years has really taken off as a safe and effective way to do Baby-Led Weaning with your baby. Because the goal here is to get diet diversity, right? Get your baby exposed to as many foods as they can. And if you think about the notion that you're traditional, like conventional adult-led spoon feeding, those babies who are spooned have at most 10, sometimes 15 foods under their belt by the time they turn one.

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And when you cross over to the second year of life, you lose a lot of foods to picky eating. It's developmentally appropriate. And if your baby only has 10 or 15 foods and you lose those to picky eating, that becomes a very challenging child to feed. Those are the babies and toddlers who end up in feeding therapy. But if your baby has a 100 foods that they can eat and you lose 10 or 15 of them to picky eating, it's not a big deal, right? You still have like 85 or 90 foods that your child can eat. So this whole idea of helping your baby eat a 100 foods before one helps build diet diversity. You're taking advantage of that flavor window. You're helping your child develop a healthy relationship with food so they eat in like actual real foods. So you don't have to make special foods, you don't have to short order to cook, you don't have to buy ridiculous processed baby foods.

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There's no expensive baby foods to buy, there's no force feeding by spoon, you don't have to short order cook, and that risk of picky eating and food allergies, that lowers as well. So it's kind of the whole package. And if you're sold on this idea of Baby-Led Weaning, I have a few suggestions for you as far as next steps go. If this is something that you think you want to explore as either a way to help your baby start solid foods, or if you wanna transition from purees or you're stuck on simple starter foods and you can't get outta that rut first, listen to some more episodes of this podcast. There's two episodes a week you can go forward. You can go backwards, you can go to blwpodcast.co, check it all out and see what's out there.

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'cause I try to make it as I hate to use bite-size as possible and digestible so that you can like get the info that you need and get out. I also would encourage you to read Gill Rapley's original Baby-Led Weaning book so that you understand the philosophy of what Baby-Led Weaning is. Don't go poking around in Facebook groups that are full of people that have only fed one baby. Okay. You wanna be learning from credentialed experts. If you want more training on how to do Baby-Led Weaning, I teach a free 75 minute workshop called Baby-Led Weaning For Beginners. I give everybody on that workshop a copy of my original 100 First Foods list because I never want you to run out of ideas of foods that your baby can eat. You can sign up for the workshop at babyledweaning.co.

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The workshop is there. I also have a full program called Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro, where I show you in videos how to do Baby-Led Weaning safely. I have my original 100 First Foods daily meal plan in there, it's like 20 weeks of meal plans. If you just like, some people are like, "I make the food, but like could you just tell me exactly what food to make and how to make it and how to make it safe?" That's all inside of my program. Again, it's called Baby-Led Weaning with Katie Ferraro, there's also a content library that shows you videos and instructions and recipes on how to make all of the 100 First Foods come to life so that your baby will grow up loving real food. All of that is available online at babyledweaning.co. I'll link those resources in the description where you're listening to this podcast.

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Don't forget to hit subscribe so that you will always have the two episodes each week showing up in your feed. And if you'd like to learn more, check out babyledeeaning.co, that's a web home base for everything. If you wanna like see what it looks like, sign up for the workshop "Baby-Led Weaning for Beginners". Sign up for the program if that's more your vibe. I am so glad that you are considering this approach and I know that when you look back you're gonna say, "making that decision to do Baby-Led Weaning and helping my baby learn to safely eat a 100 foods before they turned one, that was the best parenting decision that I ever made".

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Thanks for being here and listening. Happy Feeding