Babies and Food - Part I: The Beginning

My experience with feeding a new baby.

Being a first-time mother I worry weather or not my baby is getting the right nutrition. Willow has always been in the 75th and 85th percentile for height and weight so I haven't been worried about her in that regard but I hear people talking all the time about how their child is in the lower percentiles constantly and asking if they are feeding their child enough food. Bear in mind that the percentiles your child falls into has a lot to do with genetics and a little to do with their nutrition.

I have struggled with this "food thing" since there is no real definitive answer (that I can find) that says how much your baby should be eating and when they should be eating said amount. There are, of course, suggestions you can go by, but for a new mother the whole process of transitioning your baby from a liquid diet to a solid diet is a hard one. Never mind transitioning from baby food to "adult" food.

One thing that people often think when they have a small baby (under 4 months old) is that they should be feeding their baby rice cereal mixed in with their breast milk or formula in order to get them to sleep easier at night. This is a persistent old wives tale. The amount of food in your baby's belly has no correlation what so ever to how well your baby will sleep at night (the ability to self-soothe being developmentally-based not hunger-based ). There have been studies done and they all came to the same conclusion. Feeding your baby solid food too early can be dangerous since they are unable to digest it at a young stage and it can create food allergies later in life.

When your baby is between 4 and 6 months old, you may want to start introducing solid foods. One of the other reasons for waiting until then (the first reason being the inability to properly digest this food) is that solid food has a lot less calories in it then breast milk or formula. And since your baby's stomach is still relatively small at this stage they will not be able to hold enough solid food to make up for the calories they will be missing by not eating breast milk or formula. This is one reason to NEVER feed your baby water before 6 months old. There is no nutritional value in water and your baby gets all the liquid they need from breast milk or formula. If they seem dehydrated they should be drinking more formula or breast milk, NOT water.

When you finally start solid food, your baby will not really know what to do with it. If you put some rice cereal on your baby's tongue and they swallow it, this is a good indicator that they are ready for solids. Being able to hold their head up is also a good thing for starting solids and another reason to wait. Additionally, your baby's tongue has a reflex built in that sometimes forces stuff put into their mouth right back out. This can be frustrating but your baby will get the hang of it soon enough. And this reflex can be there until your baby is a year old. Willow can feed herself but until a couple of weeks ago (she is 11 months old) she would spit the food out even when she didn't mean to because of it.

So, 6 months rolls around and your baby is happily eating stage 1 solid foods (or the puree that you are making out of your food at home). How do you know when to transition to stage 2 foods? And then how do you know when to transition to stage 3 foods? And how do you know when you should reduce the amount of breast milk or formula you are feeding your baby?

These are all questions I have asked and somehow worked through. Tune in to the next post (Part II) to find out how we figured out what to give to Willow and when.

Liquid food was easy, solid food is another matter.



Babies and Food - Part II: Transitioning to Solids
Babies and Food - Part III: Transitioning to "Adult" Food