Baby led weaning or BLW as it is sometimes known, is a technique to encourage your baby to start the weaning process himself by offering solid food for him to choose, taste and experiment with.

Baby led weaning Guidelines

The BLW process relies and builds upon the baby’s natural desire to start reaching for foods and putting things into their mouths from the age of six months. By offering a small selection of foods to the baby and allowing him to self-feed means there is no pressure or force feeding from the parent and encourages a baby’s curiousity. This technique has proved successful in weaning babies off milk and onto solids.

If you are having trouble weaning your baby by spoon feeding purees or if your baby suddenly decides to take a disliking to your approach, then baby led weaning might be the answer to this.

With my two daughters we used both methods – Baby Led Weaning and feeding Purees. Some days we would feed purees on a spoon and other days we would offer one or two different purees, some well cooked broccolli and carrot batons, give them a spoon and sit back to watch. Emily absolutely loves her food and would happily munch through anything we gave her. Lou on the other hand was a bit more tentative and cautious with the food we offered, yet curious all the same. With both girls though the baby led weaning method helped to develop good eating habits and promoted less fussiness. They are still really good, healthy eaters now.

Baby Led Weaning Guidelines:

• Allows the baby to join in at meal times, eating similar food, while allowing you time to eat your own meal.
• This method encourages a less fussy attitude to food and develops natural curiousity to try things at least once.
• Motor skills (movements of the arms fingers and hands) and chewing skills are developed.

And here are some disadvantages to baby led weaning:

• Handing over full control of feeding to your little one can only mean a lot of mess! You will need to accept this as part of the process.
• Not all food can be formed into hand finger food shapes. We got round this with some clever recipes which you can find at the end of this article.
• You may have a fear of your baby choking. Do not let this worry you as babies have already developed natural choking and vomiting reflexes. A baby will also not develop the ability to move food to the back of the mouth until they know how to swallow solid food. It’s all natural.
• You may find you throw \ clean up more food than goes into your baby!

If you are interested in starting the baby led weaning method, make you sure you follow these dos and donts:

DO NOT:

• Do not present food which is naturally high in sugar or salt. This includes processed foods like crisps sweets and chocolate. They simply do not need them nor do they benefit from eating ‘treats’ like these. High levels of salt and sugar is harmful to your baby.
• Do not leave your baby unsupervised with food.
• Do not give your baby cutlery.

DO:

• Do offer a range of foods, colours, shapes and textures to maximize the experience.
• Do make your own fingfer foods by following recipes on this site.
• Do make sure you test new foods for allergic reactions first by using the four day rule.
• Do allow plenty of time for your baby’s mealtime.
• Do try to synchronise the babies mealtime with the rest of the family. Your baby will better learn by imitation.

Baby led weaning is becoming more and more popular as a technique to wean babies off milk. However government guidelines still recommend parents start weaning their babies using pureed food. We used a mixture of both methods with success and is what I would recommend.

Please note I am not a pediatrician or a nutritionist and my information is based on personal experience and thorough research only.

Happy weaning!