A growing number of parents are offering their babies solid food that they feed to themselves, usually at about 6 months old. Photo / Lauren Pisano, The New York Times
A growing number of parents are skipping spoon-feeding their babies and trying “baby-led weaning” instead.
Jenny Best was determined that her firstborn son would have a positive relationship with food from his very first bite. Years earlier, as a professional ballerina, she had struggled with disordered eating, and she wanted her son to think of food as fun.
But no matter what she did, the baby seemed to hate eating.
“I made the homemade purées, and I got the expensive little baby blender, and I tried to concoct these things from scratch, and then, from Day 1, he didn’t like it,” Best said, wincing at the 8-year-old memory.
“He was crying and arching his back, and turning his head, and particularly did not like me coming at him, at his face, with a spoon.”
Best’s son stopped eating altogether by his first birthday, and his weight dropped so precipitously that a doctor recommended a feeding tube. It took a team of therapists and dietitians to get him back on track. Best concluded that his issues stemmed from finding her spoon-feeding “invasive,” and when she became pregnant with twins, she resolved to find a different way to teach them how to eat.
She came across baby-led weaning, a concept pioneered in 2001 by Gill Rapley, a former midwife and public health nurse from Britain. In contrast to the conventional medical advice that parents spoon-feed babies special infant cereals and purées, parents instead offer their babies solid food that they feed to themselves, usually at about 6 months old.
To the uninitiated, baby-led weaning can seem shocking and scary: you’re really just going to hand an infant with no teeth a whole chicken drumstick? But proponents insist it is not only safe when done properly but also promotes oral and motor-skill development and a healthier, happier attitude toward food.
Best, now 47, began posting her first attempts with her twins on Instagram in 2019. They started off feeding themselves more traditional early foods, such as oatmeal and yogurt, but soon Best, an adventurous eater, grew bolder, offering them sardines, pieces of star fruit, even grasshopper and crickets. She watched in amazement as the twins delightedly grabbed, smashed, licked and tasted.
A Brooklynite who worked in New York City government for a decade after a back injury derailed her ballet career, Best suspected there were others out there who, like her, wanted easily accessible and credible information if they were going to experiment with what she calls a “countercultural approach to infant feeding”.
In the five years since, baby-led weaning has only grown in popularity, seemingly on the strength of word-of-mouth proselytising and helped along by social media. The concept seems to appeal to millennials who favour parenting philosophies that prioritise child autonomy – and who rely on the internet to optimise their lives. Proof of its ascendance is that in 2021, Gerber, which dominates the multi-billion dollar baby-food market in the United States, started labelling some products, such as cheese crunchies, “baby led friendly”. A company spokesperson said Gerber “recognised the growing interest” in independent eating.
The Instagram account Best started now has 3.5 million followers and has become the gateway to a rapidly expanding business called Solid Starts that aims to be the go-to resource for baby-led weaning and feeding, from infancy to toddlerhood.
Best eventually stopped posting about her own life and hired medical experts – her staff includes paediatricians, feeding and swallowing specialists, speech language pathologists and a dietitian who direct the guidance – but the company still reflects her belief that there is a superior way to teach your child how to eat. “As you go, remember not to force it,” its app warns. “Having food or a spoon forced into your mouth feels intrusive, and it’s the same for baby.”
But so far the American Academy of Paediatrics, the largest professional association of pediatricians in the United States, has declined to endorse baby-led weaning. There is not enough research to suggest that one approach is better than any other, said Dr. Mark Corkins, who is chair of the association’s nutrition committee and has dismissed baby-led weaning as “a social-media-driven invention”.
Corkins says he increasingly hears from parents who believe “if you don’t do baby-led weaning, you’re not doing the latest and greatest for your kid”.
Like sleep training or co-sleeping or exclusively breastfeeding, baby-led weaning has become a fraught topic for a new generation of parents. And in the online parenting sphere, they are left searching for certainty amid conflicting advice that makes them worry: will the wrong choice harm their child?
The widespread consensus that babies should learn to eat by sampling mush in progressive stages of thickness isn’t backed by definitive scientific research. Instead, the “baby food” stage has been traced to “the rise of commercial feeding products,” as Amy Bentley, a New York University professor, writes in her book, Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialiindustrialisationation of the American Diet. After years of aggressive marketing, commercially processed baby food became so mainstream by the mid-20th century that feeding it to your infant was, she writes, “no longer a novelty but a necessity, even a requirement”.
Baby-led weaning advocates say instead that many foods can be “baby food,” as long as they are served appropriately and when infants are developmentally ready – such as when they have control of their necks.
Paediatricians and other medical professionals who support the method say there are common misconceptions about how babies learn to eat. One is that babies need teeth; babies use their gums. Another is that gagging and choking are the same. Choking is deadly, but gagging is a protective mechanism.
When babies are about 6 to 9 months, the gag reflex sits closer to the front of the mouth. Proponents of baby-led weaning say this makes it an ideal time for babies to learn how to push out chunks of food with their tongue. Because babies get most of their calories and nutrients from breast milk or formula in their first year, proponents argue that it matters less that babies actually swallow food at first than it does that they learn to self-regulate and experiment with textures and tastes.
Research has found that baby-led weaning, with proper training, is not associated with an increased risk of choking, and that babies who feed themselves consume the same number of calories as babies who are spoon-fed.
The biggest hurdle to trying it, Best has found, is that parents are still afraid that their children will choke on food that is too big or the wrong texture.
So how would parents safely serve steak to a 6-month-old? According to Solid Starts’ free directory, it should be offered on the bone with big chunks of meat and fat removed, or well done and cut into pieces the size of two adult fingers pressed together. At about 9 months, when babies may begin aggressively stuffing food into their mouths, Solid Starts recommends finely chopping the meat instead, or folding minced meat into mashed potatoes or polenta. After 18 months, it says, parents might want to encourage the use of utensils and offer bite-size pieces.
Granular instructions like these are listed for more than 400 foods – from apples and bananas to branzino, granadilla and paneer. The directory includes short videos, infographics, cultural context, recipe suggestions, and nutritional and allergen information. Parents can pay for a version of the app that will eventually offer seasonally appropriate meal plans and allergen introduction schedules with exact measurements.
Solid Starts has built its business by trying to answer every possible question or concern a parent might have about baby-led weaning. There are other resources for people curious about the practice, but none are as exhaustive; as a result, it has become ubiquitous online, where fans comment about how excited they are to feed their babies “real” foods.
“My pediatrician recommended at our 4 month appointment today to start giving her rice cereal hahah I was like we will not be doing that,” one parent wrote on a Solid Starts Instagram post. “Catch her with a giant broccoli crown in her hand 2 months from now though.”
In recent years, Best said, Solid Starts has tried to distance itself from the term “baby-led weaning,” preferring “responsive feeding” instead. This is in part because the online communities can be doctrinaire – to the point that Rapley, the pioneer of the concept of baby-led weaning, specifies on her website that she doesn’t believe anyone “should feel ostracised” if they choose not to follow the practice “to the letter,” such as occasionally spoon-feeding their baby.
But Solid Starts often still bears the brunt of significant criticism of baby-led weaning.
“I felt the program was very ‘all or nothing’ and if you spoon feed baby purées you’re doomed,” a commenter wrote on one of the many online forum threads dedicated to Solid Starts. It is a typical complaint. Others say they feel guilty for not wanting to deal with all the cleanup that baby-led weaning requires.
Dr TJ Gold, a paediatrician with Tribeca Pediatrics, New York’s largest primary care pediatric practice, says she increasingly has to console parents who feel anxiety about feeding their baby the “right” way. “You have this barrage of intense information coming at you as a parent,” she said. “When it becomes so complicated, I think we lose a lot of the joy in just feeding our children.”
One mother, Brittany Kovarsy, said in an interview that she “felt like a failure” when she watched videos of happily chomping babies on Instagram while her own 9-month-old still preferred to slurp pouches. “I felt like I was robbing my son of some type of developmental experience and setting him back,” she said.
Some members of the Solid Starts team bristled at such feedback. “We don’t want to shame parents,” said Kary Rappaport, one of Solid Starts’ feeding and swallowing specialists, “we don’t want to pressure parents, but I don’t think it’s providing accurate information and evidence-based resources and guidance that creates guilt in parents.”
The company now tries to be more inclusive by incorporating information about pureés and pouches, but its overall messaging still implies that parents who deviate from baby-led weaning risk adverse outcomes.
“How you go about starting solids matters,” warned the caption on one Solid Starts Instagram story depicting a 7-month-old sharing corn on the cob with his dad. “Serve what you eat. Trust your child. Make it joyful.”
Jennifer Anderson, a dietitian who runs Kids Eat in Colour, a company that also advises parents on how to feed their kids, said she believed that more research was needed before anyone could say that baby-led weaning was best.
“Parents are being sold a false story that if they take a certain action, they will not have any negative outcomes,” she said, when in reality, many factors affect a child’s relationship to food that are out of a parent’s control, from neurodivergence to what happens at day care. “They feel mad if they do it and still have a picky baby.”
For years, Best herself was the target of this sort of ire online. It dissipated after she largely stopped sharing photos and videos of herself and her family. And for every critic, there are ardent fans, many of whom are women who, like Best, didn’t want to bring their own food issues to the table with their children.
“I have had the same experience as many millennial moms with food, including early and frequent exposure to diet culture,” one parent wrote to the company.
“Solid Starts has been very healing for me too.”
Best said she believed it was ultimately up to parents to set boundaries for themselves while navigating the relentless onslaught of advice online. All she’s done, she said, is create the resource she desperately needed when she was trying to persuade her son to eat.
“At the end of the day, why are we, as parents, so hungry for all this information?” Best asked. “Because we don’t trust ourselves.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Katie J. M. Baker
Photographs by: Lauren Pisano
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Let’s take a look at the science.