After six months of exclusive breastfeeding, your baby is ready to begin complementary feeding. It can be daunting at the start: What do I feed the baby? How do I cook it? How do I keep my baby safe? How do I cultivate a good feeding culture?
See below what we did for our three children:
- Ensure your baby’s safety by never feeding the baby while they are in your arms. Invest in a robust feeding chair or place them in a car seat where they will sit upright. Choose a high seat with good and practical safety features where the baby will not be able to slide out or jump out. Learn how to perform first aid for a choking baby.
- Introduce one food at a time so that you can look out for allergies. Begin with starches and fruits, then gradually introduce vegetables, plant proteins and then animal proteins last. Remember that, during the first 12 months the primary source of nutrients for your baby is breastmilk, so make sure to not replace it entirely. 3 meals and 3 feeds of milk should be sufficient.
- Give the baby plenty of water. Do not flavour it, let them get used to drinking plain water. Keep offering water throughout even if they show no interest. This is to reduce chances of constipation.
- Stock some infant glycerol suppositories in case your baby gets constipated. With each of our babies during the season of weaning we have struggled with constipation for about a month, on and off. If your baby gets constipated for 24 hours, place them on their back, insert the suppository, massage the lower abdomen and wait for the floodgates to open
. Keep re-inserting the same suppository until the bowel is emptied. Quite a dirty job but well worth it when you see the relief on your baby’s face. Don’t wait too long to intervene because it gets worse with every day. - Do not blend the baby’s food, unless you are making juice. Mash it until soft using a fork, so that from the onset they can learn to swallow small particles of food. Then keep making the food more and more course. By the time they are 12 months they should be able to eat soft foods that are not mashed. If you start them off with blending, it will be very difficult to begin to introduce foods with a coarse texture.
- You don’t have to give you baby bland foods. Especially if your baby is refusing to eat, try fry their food and add a bit of natural spices.
- From early on, begin to introduce the baby to family food, so that you don’t have to always separately cook the baby’s food. By the time they are 8 months, let them eat what the family is eating, unless the specific meal is not baby-friendly.
- Teach your baby to feed themselves. Allow them finger foods of the right size for their age. From 8 months teach them to use a spoon. Start off by feeding them then give them a spoon and allow them to try to feed themselves. It will be messy at first, but in a few months your baby will be feeding independently with a spoon. Children can learn this skill anywhere from 9 months (like my daughter) to 18 months depending on both your consistency and their capability.
For Older Children (24 months +) – Cultivating Healthy Feeding Habits
- Once they get into the rhythm of family meals do not allow them options because they ‘do not like’ certain foods. Let them know that they need to eat all foods, as long as they are not allergic, even if they do not like it. That is the real world. Tell them that God made all food and therefore all food is good.
- Encourage your children to eat sufficient portions of food using a reward system. Serve just enough food, and reward the child who will complete the food given. You can also reward pace, so that you discourage them from taking too long to eat.
- Encourage your child to say ‘Thank You’ and clear the table after eating. Reward them when they remember to do this.
- Insist that meal times are the only times to eat. You have to eat your food when you are called to eat. No in-betweens. If you don’t eat your food now, you will be offered the same food during the next meal time. And even if you get hungry in-between because you did not eat when you were meant to, you will just have to wait for the next meal time.
- The children are to eat only from their own plate what they have been served. They should not finish their food and start asking others for their food – even from parents. This especially applies to favourite foods which children never seem to have enough of. It teaches children to be selfless, content, moderate and considerate. And they will not be eating from the guests’ plates.
What have you found helpful during the weaning period for your baby? How have you cultivated healthy feeding habits?
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