The Future of BLW with its Founding Philosopher Gill Rapley, PhD (Part 2)

Gill Rapley (0s):

It's also about the shared meal times, the healthy food, the respect for the baby, allowing the baby to decide how quickly to eat, how much and so one. It embraces is so much more than just a method of feeding.

Katie Ferraro (15s):

Hey, there I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietician, college nutrition professor, and mom of seven specializing in baby-led weaning here on the Baby-Led Weaning Made Easy podcast. I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leading you with the competence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby-led, weaning. Hello, and welcome back. This is part two of my interview with Gill Rapley. The founding philosopher of the baby-led weaning movement and co-author of the baby-led weaning essential guidebook. Now, if you haven't had a chance to listen to part one, that was episode number 100, and Gill shared all about how she essentially made baby-led weaning into a thing she doesn't claim to have invented the idea of babies feeding themselves, but she certainly is responsible for making it a thing.

Katie Ferraro (1m 9s):

So Gill is talking about her book in that episode, she's talking all about the initial pushback that she got when she started writing and speaking and teaching about baby-led weaning. That was episode a hundred. In this episode, Gill is going to be talking about where she sees baby-led weaning going in the future. We're going to dive into the topics of social media, touching on how it yes has helped advance the movement, but also how Gill deals with a lot of the darker areas of social media and baby-led weaning: the judginess and the cliqueiness. And how does she respond when people define baby-led weaning in a way that is not true to her original intent at the end of the day, what I hope you'll take away from this second part of my interview with Gill Rapley is how important it is not to focus on all the things your baby can't do or can't eat.

Katie Ferraro (1m 53s):

Instead she's encouraging and reminding us to reframe the conversation and our approach to starting solid foods so that we're really zoning in on all the things our babies can do to feed themselves. And also all of the foods out there that they can eat safely. So with no further ado, I want to bring Gill Rapley back on to talk about the future of baby-led weaning. Gill, welcome back. Thank you again for joining us for part two of our conversation about the history of baby-led weaning. And now we're going to look at the future of baby-led weaning.

Gill Rapley (2m 22s):

I'm really delighted to to be back. Thank you.

Katie Ferraro (2m 24s):

Now there are many inaccurate perceptions of baby-led weaning. I don't need to tell you that a lot of times there are individuals or even groups who, of course don't entirely understand childhood growth and development and nutrition. And I was just curious, how do you think that credentialed practitioners can be more involved in responsively promoting baby-led weaning in today's current feeding environment?

Gill Rapley (2m 45s):

I think they themselves need to be open-minded and willing to perhaps unlearn some of the kind of givens that they've grown up with. So for example, the idea that you have to start by introducing a spoon when actually maybe that could be bit later, if they can sell, learn about baby-led weaning and see it in action and get it, then then going to be much more able to share that with parents and move things forward. They also need to listen to parents who are doing it and understand what actually is happening. There are many people, many professionals, as well as parents, but particularly professionals who are under the impression that baby-led weaning is something a bit new.

Gill Rapley (3m 25s):

And actually, if they would just ask some of their clients who are parents will say three or more children, they would find that actually it's been going on forever, but it hasn't been talked about as I think I mentioned in our previous discussion, it didn't have a name before. The other thing that I think is really important for professionals is to check the influence over their work and their thinking from the baby food industry, the baby food industry has a big interest in dismissing baby-led weaning effectively because if parents are not going to buy pouches of pureed foods, then that's going to impact on the whole commercial aspect of their work.

Gill Rapley (4m 6s):

We know from work around breastfeeding, that sadly many professionals are influenced by industry and it affects the way they understand things, suggestions and advice that they give to parents. So we really do need to take stock of what our relationship is with the manufacturers and distributors of baby foods.

Katie Ferraro (4m 25s):

And that's such a wonderful point because we get our information from so many different sources from our families, from books that we read from social media, as well as credentialed professionals. But you make such an important point that we also are influenced by the baby food industry. And I know in many parts of the world, it's similar, but you go to the store and there's an aisle full of foods that are essentially well a they weren't around a hundred years ago. Be there entirely fabricated. No one would describe them as natural with added sugars and added salts. And the one that kills me in the baby food aisle in the U S at least are the shelf stable yogurt products like think about that. You buy yogurt out of a refrigerated section of a grocery store that has live active cultures in it.

Katie Ferraro (5m 8s):

The other day I was at a store, a small four ounce portion had six grams. So a teaspoon and a half of added sugar in a product that was marketed as a baby yogurt sitting on the shelf. Like it was the farthest removed thing from real food. And yet, as you point out, there are billions of dollars surrounding the influence and trying to make us think that this is a product that's needed.

Gill Rapley (5m 29s):

We could do with much tighter legislation around these things as well. But that's going to be a welcoming, I fear.

Katie Ferraro (5m 35s):

I love personally about working in the field of infant feeding all of the different disciplines that I get to interact with, who all play important roles in helping our kids get a safe start to solid foods. So I'm talking about pediatricians and speech, language pathologists, occupational therapists. We have other dieticians and child development specialists. I wanted to know if you might share your thoughts when we were talking about the different healthcare disciplines, like who currently are involved in baby-led weaning, but any thoughts on who you'd like to see more involved in baby-led weaning moving forward?

Gill Rapley (6m 5s):

Well, as you say, there are already quite a lot of disciplines that are interested in this. I guess the kind of first adopters were the breastfeeding community, lactation consultants, breastfeeding counselors and professionals who knew a lot about breastfeeding, but it's exciting to me to discover how many disciplines have something in common in terms of feeding babies. I wish I had understood that much earlier. I don't don't think I realized that so many other professionals might be interested before I even came up with the baby-led weaning. I mean, I was particularly thrilled when I was approached by orthodontists because they see a relevance for babies chewing from earlier than they would, if they were started on thyroid fluids and that many helping to influence the way that develops the shape of the face on how well the teeth fit later, especially those orthodontists who practice orthotropics, which is quite a new part of that discipline.

Gill Rapley (6m 59s):

So to get an email out of the booth from an orthodontist was amazing to me, it's so relevant. So important. So as well as the professionals that you mentioned, it extends to health visitors, midwives, public health nurses, pediatric nurses should have an interest child, psychologists, even physiotherapists. There are just so many that may be involved. We don't have facial mycologists much in the UK, but they've contacted me from other countries and awful lot to offer to understand. And I think an awful lot of the research to date has been around the food itself. So it's tended to sit in the range of pediatrics and dietetic for nutrition, but it's so much broader than that.

Gill Rapley (7m 43s):

Any health professional, whoever discusses the feeding of babies toddlers could do with engaging with baby-led weaning. And I find that for so many therapists, unfortunately, therapy often seems to start from a position of what the baby can't do, but I'm finding an increasing interest among, let's say for example, speech and language therapists who are excited by baby-led weaning because it starts from the position of what the baby can do. And then build on that in the past. People have said to me, surely when is Contra indicated for some children, babies with developmental delay, for example, and I hate that word. Contra-indicated absolutely not. It just needs to be adapted. It's not appropriate to just offer a child's food and leave them to get on with it.

Gill Rapley (8m 25s):

If they clearly aren't capable of feeding themselves, I wouldn't ever suggest that, but if we start from what they can do and build on that, then the world can open up to them so much more. I have a good friend, Polly, who was the speech and language therapist who uses baby-led weaning or not with babies with down syndrome. And she finds it amazing. She said it helps with so many areas of the development. It brings the national sales gets them to engage. It helps with their core strength that it helps with their dexterity. It's not just about getting them to eat. It's about all of the aspects of their development.

Katie Ferraro (8m 59s):

And you mentioned that oftentimes it's not all, but there are certainly a subset of the therapy world that does start at the position of what a baby can't do. And I would say that from my side as a dietician in nutrition, so many dieticians are trained to think about all the things that a baby can't eat. But instead, if we can look at if all the many foods out there that babies can eat, it kind of dovetails on what you were saying, that that is opens up a world of possibilities for babies of all different abilities. And I myself have moved away from using any language about Contra indication or who is baby-led weaning. Not for, to be honest, at this point, I'm hard pressed to find a population that it doesn't work for. It's more often than not the parents or the pediatricians that it doesn't work for, but the baby themselves certainly has the ability to learn how to do this, but you're right.

Katie Ferraro (9m 40s):

It does need to be adapted at times.

Gill Rapley (9m 42s):

I think that's the really interesting point that it felt from the parents or the health professionals for whom it doesn't work. But for babies, it works. Yes. Parents and professionals have to be prepared to let go and give that control to the baby and to show that baby respect. And then the baby can take it from there, but that's the tricky bit. So parents have struggled with baby-led weaning. It's nearly, always difficult for them, for whatever reason, not actually for their baby. You mentioned

Katie Ferraro (10m 9s):

The role of dietetics and nutrition. And so often the focus is on the food. Like parents go to that six month appointment and they start talking about iron may be. But I know personally when I was studying to be a dietician over 20 years ago, there was no talk of infants knowing how to sell feed or parents and caregivers like that. They even needed to be involved in the baby learning how to sell feed. And to be honest now, as a college nutrition professor myself, I'm still disheartened by the outdated and really narrow-minded approach to traditional infant feeding curriculum that we teach our future providers. So I wanted to ask you how we can help current and future practitioners understand that baby-led weaning is a safe and viable alternative to traditional spoon-feeding. Cause they're not getting it in medical or nutrition education.

Katie Ferraro (10m 49s):

And more importantly though, how did like the practitioners talk to their parents and their patients? Like how can we give them the confidence that babies can do this? Because if they don't hear it from the practitioners and they don't hear it from you, they might never hear this message.

Gill Rapley (11m 1s):

I don't really have an easy answer to that, but I think we need to be sure if we are teachers that, and I do do some university lecturing myself, make sure that the curriculum covers it, making sure that the curriculum is broad enough to look at all aspects of feeding and perhaps encourage students to deconstruct feeding and eating and try and see it from the baby's point of view. My doctoral research was very much about examining what the feeding experience is like for the baby, as far as I possibly could, without being able to interview babies course, but seeing how they respond to food presented to them, for them to explore as opposed to food presented on a spoon, there were just huge differences.

Gill Rapley (11m 43s):

This was just massive. And it immediately made me wonder, we have an awful lot of research about how babies develop food preferences. And depending on what study you read, they will tell you, you have to introduce new food to a baby eight times or 15 times or whatever, before he will accept it. I really struggle with that word accept. Whereas the enjoyment in that it's still so much that the language in the research is around getting babies to comply with what the adults want and assuming that babies don't want to eat. I mentioned before, when we were talking in our previous interview about the idea that we have to make eating fun, we have to just stop making it miserable.

Gill Rapley (12m 27s):

Babies will eat. They want to, but we also have to understand that their motivation for starting with solid food is probably nothing to do with hunger it's to do with exploring their world and testing things out with their mouth and with all of their senses. And they discovered by chance that this stuff tastes good, fills their tummy, whatever, but that's not their initial motivation and all the time we make it about food itself. And then I think we're missing part of the way that we can understand babiesA

Katie Ferraro (12m 57s):

As someone who eally struggled myself with traditional spoonfeeding. With my oldest, I have to admit I was super skeptical about a baby's ability to self feed. When I went to start solids with my next babies who happened to be quadruplets, but for me, at least, and I know a lot of other parents that's true, seeing really was believing. And I think that visual aspect is so important for getting people on board with baby-led weaning, and a lot of the visual ability to see this has happened through social media. So I was interested in your opinions on how you think social media has helped advance the baby-led weaning move.

Gill Rapley (13m 29s):

Well, it has helped enormously, partly as you say, because it's allowed people to upload videos and images of food, images of their babies, eating and enjoying food that has inspired others and help them to understand it. I'm still not sure there's really a substitute for seeing it in real life with a baby, but a video is a very close second, but also from very early on the forums that built up around baby-led weaning and Facebook groups, for example, have supported parents in being brave enough to do something which other people were skeptical about when to stick their neck out and do something that wasn't seen as the normal thing to do.

Gill Rapley (14m 9s):

So I think that has been another huge impact of social media. So it's also been meant. Parents can share discussions about, for example, how do I deal with my mother or my mother-in-law, who is uncertain about this and give each other suggestions and ways to handle it. And certainly the rapid spread of baby winning would not have been possible without social media. That's how it spread by just like wildfire. Yeah. It's been amazing.

Katie Ferraro (14m 36s):

I think especially that notion of support and community. I see that so much in my own audience for recording this nine months into a global pandemic. So many parents feeling very isolated. I feel like I'm the only one doing this. And then to have this community in a Facebook group or on an Instagram live or in a private course where you have the opportunity to interact with other like-minded parents who believe it's possible, but also just a place to kind of bounce ideas back and forth. Hey, I'm struggling with this to not feel like you're the only one doing that. I think social media has been so wonderful for that, but I know while we're on the topic of social media, I wonder if you could just speak to the unfortunate reality that baby-led weaning has gotten to some degree, a reputation as being judgemental or a clicky movement.

Katie Ferraro (15m 18s):

How has social media played into that negative side of promoting or bringing attention to baby-led weaning?

Gill Rapley (15m 24s):

I guess you'd have to have some bad with some goods. So there's bound to be a downside to social media. I think maybe they'd leaning because it's something that appeared to be new and that's a bit radical. It's become a bit niche in some places. So it's a bit like baby wearing and co-sleeping, it's kind of seen as something rather extreme, but at least we can have a dialogue now. And that's really important because we can discuss it. What saddens me is when parents are slapped down for not being purist, for example, about baby-led weaning for not obeying to the letter, if you like, if we ever get a spoon, you can't be a member of our group. That's very sad to me, but I often get asked about how I feel about how purest one should be.

Gill Rapley (16m 9s):

And I think it's tricky for me to answer that because if I'm not curious, then who on earth is going to be, I have to be because I first wrote about this thing. And it's very important to me that we do have a clear definition of what baby-led weaning is. Because if we don't, then someone will hear it from someone who heard it from someone else. And it becomes distorted. In fact, that was the first, the main reason that I got together with Tracy to write our first book was to document what actually this phenomenon, this philosophy was, if you like, because it was already becoming distorted. And if somebody thinks they're doing baby-led weaning, but they're not, then they miss out on the benefits of it potentially.

Gill Rapley (16m 49s):

Plus when it comes to research and we do want to have more research into this. The definition is it's hugely important. It's just as important as for example, defining what exclusive breastfeeding means in terms of a search. If you don't define these things, then you can't assure that the outcomes you're seeing are true. And, and a lot of the outcomes will be masked if we're not actually observing the thing in its purest form. So it's really important to me to have that distinction, but that is completely different from saying what an individual parents should or shouldn't do with their own baby. In other words, I suppose if you break it down into, since it's form, it's not about what you do that is entirely up to you, but it's what you call it.

Gill Rapley (17m 30s):

I'd really prefer if it wasn't called baby-led weaning. If it isn't quite baby-led weaning and a lot of parents, for example, nowadays, talk about doing a bit of both and a lot of writers in the field of infant feeding, who previously didn't talk about baby-led weaning, and perhaps now embracing it as often. Talk about doing a bit of both, but you can't do a bit of both. You, you introduced me as the philosopher. I certainly think of it as a yeah. Philosophy. Why not? It's not a method of feeding. Certainly a method of feeding would be spoon-feeding or self feeding in campuses that, but it's also about the shared mealtimes, the healthy food, the respect for the baby, the allowing the baby to decide how quickly to eat, how much to eat and so on.

Gill Rapley (18m 16s):

So it embraces so much more than just a method of feeding. And so to do a bit of both, yes, you can do a bit of spoon-feeding and a bit of self-feeding, but that is not baby-led weaning because it's missing out all the other elements. Put it another way you can't combine two approaches. You can't combine trusting your baby with not trusting your baby. Can't trust them at the beginning of the meal and then give them some spoonfuls at the end to make sure they've had enough, because you're not actually believing that they know their own appetite. You can't trust them one day and not the next day and the approach which involves respect and trust for the baby is very different from one in which the parent controls what's going on.

Gill Rapley (18m 57s):

So yes, by all means do a combination of methods, but you can't do a combination of approaches. The other thing to say about the internet I'm often asked why I don't intervene on Facebook groups and other forums when things are being discussed, that perhaps are not appropriate or that I wouldn't agree with. And the simple answer is I can't possibly police all of those groups, even if I wanted to, I don't speak enough languages. It's all over the world. Now it's quite out of hand. I can't keep up with it, but also I don't want to stifle a debate and discussion, even if I could, I don't want to try and own it or have them stamp down any useful dialogue. So it doesn't see it as my place.

Gill Rapley (19m 37s):

Instead. I tried to make sure that what I say is clear and what is put out from me and presentations and on my websites is playing to understand and easy to grasp so that people can come back to fact check things with me. If they're uncertain.

Katie Ferraro (19m 54s):

If Gill Rapley of 20 years ago, it was talking to Gill Rapley of today, what do you think would surprise you the most about how the baby-led weaning movement and philosophy has evolved?

Gill Rapley (20m 2s):

I think I would be amazed at the huge spread and uptake. There's been a never really stopped to think about where I hope. Well, I kind of guess I hoped they would revolutionize the world, but in practical terms, what that means about people talking about baby-led, weaning people who've never heard of me. And that's really exciting. I never would have imagined that the books should. I see, and I have written would be translated into over 20 languages already. I wouldn't believe that baby-led weaning would be accepted into the Oxford English dictionary, which happened a couple of years ago. And for myself, I wouldn't have imagined having this wonderful friendship and working relationship with Tracy, which has just been so liberating.

Gill Rapley (20m 49s):

And I wouldn't have imagined the travel possibilities that would open for me personally. I'm so blessed and so lucky to have been invited to speak and so many different functions. I've been well, two loads, but for example, as staff long as Canada, US, south America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, European countries, Romania, Slovenia, just been incredible. I feel so very lucky to just come up with something at the right time when it resonated with enough people to take off on its own. It's almost like it's my baby. And it's out into the world. In fact, it is now actually 19 years old, I guess my first book about it.

Gill Rapley (21m 30s):

So it really has come of age and it seems to be here to say, and I'm absolutely thrilled by that. And what

Katie Ferraro (21m 35s):

Are your hopes for the baby-led weaning approach to feeding in the next 10 or 20 years? Like what would you like to see happen in the future? As far as BLW is concerned for healthcare providers, researchers, parents, what's your hope for the next decades?

Gill Rapley (21m 49s):

I'd like to see more research properly conducted into the potential outcomes of baby-led weaning. We do need to know what it might signify for babies, because I think there's a possibility that it could have huge ramifications. So for example, as I mentioned in our understanding of the development of food preferences, we have all this research about how many times you have to offer food to a baby before they will accept it, but that's when you offer it to write down a spoon. That's what all that research seems to relate to can be a completely different matter. If you offer that food as a piece for the baby to pick up and explore. Certainly my PhD work showed that babies had a completely different response if it was offered to them in a different way.

Gill Rapley (22m 34s):

So what we think of as all knowledge about how babies engaged with food needs to be thrown up in the air and looked at again, because we've done it all with a backdrop of spoon-feeding. If we take that out of the equation, how different might it be? This goes back to my very early thoughts when babies were refusing food, it wasn't the food, it was the feeding they didn't buy. And I think we need to do all of the literature that we have in the light of that, and perhaps redo some of that research. We need to know it would be great to know if babies can actually choose the right nutrients to eat. There was a very old piece of research by a Dr. Clark Davis, which has really been the only thing that has looked at that it needs repeating because it was flawed, but there is every reason to believe that it may be the case that when presented with an array of foods, babies can decide what they need in terms of what nutrients.

Gill Rapley (23m 27s):

For example, many parents tell me that their babies naturally gravitate towards meat and eggs when they first start solid feeding around six months, and that fits entirely with the first nutrients they're likely to need being iron. It will be good to know if bended winning really does have a role play in the reduction of obesity and in developing dexterity, hand-eye coordination, speech and language, maybe that's important. And then the facial growth and the development of teeth and the possible needle, not for orthodontics later, it may have a role there. I think we need to know more about choking and to really understand how handling food is important in the prevention of choking, because it tells the baby how the food's going to behave in his mouth.

Gill Rapley (24m 15s):

I've also heard anecdotally from parents that when they follow baby-led weaning as a toddler, their baby, their child doesn't seem interested in putting stones and marbles and lingo bricks in his or her mouth. It's almost as if they've been there done that. And we have to recognize the choking happens often on toys and, and little things like that. So I think there's more, we need to understand about the mechanisms of choking and how much actually the practice that babies get with baby-led. Weaning is beneficial. Another point that we perhaps overlook is what is slow start. So many babies make with baby-led weaning. This is absolutely ideal for them developing the skills. They need very different, having something put in your mouth for you and then having to deal with it.

Gill Rapley (24m 56s):

Similarly, I think we could do a lot more understanding about how allergies develop. One of the things that's clear from baby-led weaning. And again, the slow start that the baby will start by picking food up, looking at it, sniffing it, tasting it before they ever ingest it. And I again had anecdotal stories from parents about babies who consistently refused certain foods only to discover later that they were allergic to them. Probably the most amazing story in that category was one given to me by a mom in the states. When I was speaking over there, her 15 year old son had a reaction to tree nuts, which in fact, it turned out he'd been allergic to all his life, but it wasn't discovered until he was age 15.

Gill Rapley (25m 43s):

And he commented after he was recovered from the episode that he really shouldn't have eaten the cookie that was offered to him because it didn't smell right on his mom reflected that he'd actually always sniffed his food before eating it since he was really tiny. And it seems that he was detecting something in the food. He didn't know what it was. His parents had no idea what was going on, but he was keeping himself safe from this thing that he was clearly allergic to. And his mum was amazed that actually his ability to keep himself safe for all those years. And as I said to her, but it wasn't just him. Was it, you never forced into each anything thing that he didn't want to eat. And I think that's huge should respect babies much more.

Gill Rapley (26m 27s):

So I think there's work to be done there as well. The other big thing I would love to see really looked at is how babies spalls skills develop. And in what order is it normal for learning to clear a spoon with your lips to happen early and before a baby really got to grips with chewing? I suspect these things might happen in an opposite order. We have this idea too, that purees are easy to eat. And yet I know of some which suggesting that may not be the case at all. Certainly if you are, I would try and chew a pure right. We would actually find that really quite difficult. It would sort of splurge or over the inside of our mouth and be very difficult to gather together. But we have this idea that babies must move through very liquid purees to gradually rise and so on to food with a more recognizable texture in order to be able to cope with it, but actually drinking and chewing up very different mechanisms, babies knowing how to drink.

Gill Rapley (27m 24s):

And then they become able to chew from around about six months, but they're using very different muscles and different skills to do that. It's quite possible. I think that puring is actually muddying the waters and causing more problems on itself by making it difficult for babies to adapt skill, to find the skills that they really need for each texture. So for example, when we first start feeding quite runny purees to babies, essentially they're just swallowing it much like a liquid and way back when I was first health visiting, I found that a lot of babies ran into problems that sort of round about eight months old when their mothers started to introduce, to raise with lumps in, is that actually what we call back then the second stage dinners, because they were trying to, or it seemed to me, they were trying to swallow them like a liquid and the lumps were catching in their throat often compared how we would swallow a thick tomato soup as adults, how we would sort of slip it in with how we would tackle a bowl full of muesli.

Gill Rapley (28m 23s):

You wouldn't use the same technique. And I think possibly purees have been encouraging babies to use a technique that is not appropriate for more solid foods. And that's why they've been getting into trouble. If we could separate the liquids from the solids more obviously, and that babies tackled them differently, perhaps they would get on better. And perhaps the skills that we observe would appear in a different order or at a different rate. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the textbooks around the development of all skills, again, have been written with a backdrop of spoon-feeding. And we need to take that out of the equation and look at how those, how skills developed without that there and see really what babies are capable of.

Katie Ferraro (29m 0s):

And I would argue that the textbooks in nutrition have also been written certainly with the backdrop of spoonfeeding, with the assumption that everything needs to be iron fortified, which assumes essentially that babies cannot learn how to eat foods that are naturally good sources of iron and zinc and other important nutrients, which by the way, they've been doing for millennia prior to the advent of commercial baby food. So I can echo what you're saying from the developmental side, that nutrition certainly needs those same updates.

Gill Rapley (29m 28s):

Yep. I think we're on the same page there.

Katie Ferraro (29m 30s):

Thank you for sharing this with my audience. I can't thank you enough. Well, guys, that was the second part of my two part interview with Gill Rapley, talking about her, take on the future of baby-led weaning. If didn't catch the first part it's episode number 100, we talked about the history of baby-led weaning with Joe Rapley. This was the future. And I loved that. She was willing to talk about the social media aspect of baby-led weaning. We did a lot of back and forth before these episodes and I didn't want to be rude and be like, how do you feel about really super judgy Facebook groups that totally misinterpret your original intention of baby-led weaning? She's the one that brought it up, like, no, ask me about it. So I like to remind parents that when Gill Rapley wrote her original baby-led weaning book with Tracy Marquette, it was in 2008.

Katie Ferraro (30m 12s):

And we were essentially in the pre social media era, right? Facebook was only four years old. Instagram was still two years away. The way that people got information about baby-led weaning then looks different than it does now. And despite that, or maybe because of it, I think Gill Rapley, these words ring ever so true. And I'm so grateful that she would come on this platform of a podcast, which wasn't even around in 2008 to share her ideas with the next generation of parents who hopefully have read her book. But if they haven't are still able to get her message. So, as I said, we had a lot of conversations going back and forth. I literally have never met or had anyone else as prepared on this podcast for an interview as Gill Rapley makes sense. It's the whole podcast, literally dedicated to everything she created and invented, but she was super prepared.

Katie Ferraro (30m 57s):

And in the lead up, I remember her saying a couple of times, like her initial thoughts as a health visitor, when she noticed that babies were refusing food, it wasn't the food, it was the feeding that they didn't like. And I know that for so many of us, myself included when you discover and then become enamored with baby-led weaning, you do so because somewhere in your past, or perhaps in real life, you did struggle with traditional spoonfeeding or you had friends who did, or I know for me was with my oldest daughter, Molly. It was such a dark period of motherhood for me when she would not eat the food that I was trying to spoonfeed to her. And I didn't know what I was doing wrong. So I think Rapley words of advice in today's episode, we should just take to heart, which is that we can and should respect our babies a lot more than many of us do.

Katie Ferraro (31m 41s):

She acknowledges that there's a lot of work to be done there. And so I hope that hearing Dr Ripley's words right from her mouth will inspire you to continue on. Or maybe even if you're just getting started to even consider taking a baby-led weaning journey with your baby and your family, because our babies can do so much more than we give them credit for. So thank you, Gill Rapley for making that. So incredibly apparent to us through your tireless efforts to promote the philosophy of baby-led weaning. I know personally, I'm so grateful for Rapley in her work. It's afforded me the opportunity to focus the entirety of my career as a dietician on her principles and practices. Not only to help six of my own seven children succeed with baby-led weaning at home, but now to help tens of thousands of families get a safe start to solid foods using baby-led weaning through my work as a dietician.

Katie Ferraro (32m 27s):

And you might be surprised there's actually very few credentialed professionals in the world of feeding who are dedicated exclusively to baby-led weaning. A lot of people like dabble in it, but certainly in nutrition and dietetics where the vast majority of my, they still promote and espouse traditional spoon-feeding. And I think that's really unfortunate because so many of them don't yet know about the benefits of self-feeding or the research that supports baby-led weaning as a safe alternative to spoonfeeding. So if you guys are interested in learning more about baby-led weaning and how to give your baby a safe start to solid foods with baby-led weaning, I teach a free online workshop every week. It's called baby-led weaning for beginners. How to get your baby to try 100 foods before turning one, without you having to spoonfeed purees or buy pouches.

Katie Ferraro (33m 8s):

So in 2016, I created the a hundred first foods approach to baby-led weaning. I have a whole hundred first foods list that I give to everyone on this free baby-led weaning for beginners workshop. If you want to get signed up for this week's workshop times, you can go to the show notes page for this episode, it's at blwpodcast.com/102, come and join the baby-led weaning for beginners workshop. Everybody gets a copy of my hundred first foods list, and I also host a large Q and A at the end of each of the workshops in case you have any baby-led weaning questions hanging around. So hope you guys are continuing to learn about baby-led weaning. It's so wonderful that we have the opportunity to hear from its founding philosopher, Gill Rapley. Thank you so much for listening to this important episode about the future of baby-led weaning with its founding philosopher, Gill Rapley.

Katie Ferraro (33m 53s):

And if you haven't heard episode number 100, where Rapley talks about the history of baby-led weaning, go check that one as well.