At what age did you start feeding your baby more solid food?

Question

I am meaning like cheerios and those jar food with little pick up carrots and green beans? The jar meat sticks that are easy to chew?

Answer 1

My daughter who is 1 year old has never eat baby food.She has always eaten table food.She did not like baby food or baby cereal.She now weighs 22 pounds.

Answer 2

Wait until your baby can sit up and has a few teeth to chew with before you give cheerios and harder food....

http://www.gerber.com/promos/fpindex?promoid=155

Try looking at Gerbers suggestions on when to start your baby with certain foods...
Good luck!

Answer 3

My son will be 9 months on the 22nd, and we just recently started with those Gerber puffs broken in half. This past weekend we started Cheerios, but you have to be sooo careful. I haven't given meat sticks yet - they just seem waaaaaay too hazardous. I am going to try thoroughly cooked vegetables veggies as sson as I have time! Also, I give him very crispy toast and he is lerngin to take smaller peices, but he gags frequently so I am so hestitant to do it.

Answer 4

I have always fed my baby table food, never baby food. Baby food is overprocessed and unneccesary.

http://www.borstvoeding.com/voedselintroductie/vast_voedsel/rapley_guidelines.html

Breastfeeding as the basis for self-feeding
Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended for the first six months of life. Breastfeeding is the ideal preparation for self-feeding with solid foods. Breastfeeding babies feed at their own pace – indeed, it is impossible to force them to do anything else! They also balance their own intake of food and fluid by choosing how long each feed should last. Breastfeeding is essentially self-feeding, with the baby in control of the process. And, because breastmilk changes in flavour according to the mother’s diet, breastfeeding prepares the baby for other tastes.

It is not clear whether a baby-led approach to the introduction of solids is appropriate for babies who are bottle fed; more research is needed to establish this, since bottle-feeding seems to be more mother-led. It is difficult to make predictions about how bottle-fed babies will manage solids, so we need to be careful. However, as long as care is taken to ensure an adequate fluid intake (see below), there would seem to be nothing inherently wrong in adopting this approach. It is recommended that parents of babies who are being bottle (formula) fed discuss the matter fully with their health advisers if they wish to use this method.

Won’t he choke?
Many parents worry about babies choking. However, there is good reason to believe that babies are at less risk of choking if they are in control of what goes into their mouth than if they are spoon fed. This is because babies are not capable of intentionally moving food to the back of their throats until after they have learnt to chew. And they do not develop the ability to chew until after they have developed the ability to reach out and grab things. Thus, a very young baby cannot easily put himself at risk because he cannot get the food into his mouth in the first place. On the other hand, the action used to suck food off a spoon tends to take the food straight to the back of the mouth, causing gagging. This means that spoon feeding has its own potential to lead to choking – and makes the giving of lumpy foods with a spoon especially dangerous.

It appears that a baby’s general development keeps pace with the development of his ability to manage food in his mouth, and to digest it. A baby who is struggling to get food into his mouth is probably not quite ready to eat it. It is important to resist the temptation to ‘help’ the baby in these circumstances since his own developmental abilities are what ensure that the transition to solid feeding takes place at the right pace for him. This process is also what keeps him safe from choking on small pieces of food, since, if he is not yet able to pick up small objects using his finger and thumb, he will not be able to get, for example, a pea or a raisin into his mouth. Once he is able to do this, he will have developed the necessary oral skills to deal with it. Putting foods into a baby’s mouth for him overrides this natural protection and increases the risk of choking.

Tipping a baby backwards or lying him down to feed him solid foods is dangerous. A baby who is handling food should always be supported in an upright position. In this way, food which he is not yet able to swallow, or does not wish to swallow, will fall forward out of his mouth, not backwards into his throat.

Adopting a baby-led approach doesn’t mean abandoning all the common sense rules of safety. While it is very unlikely that a young baby would succeed in picking up a peanut, for example, accidents can and will happen on rare occasions – however the baby is fed. Rules of safety which apply in other play situations should therefore be adhered to when eating is in progress.