Gill Rapley from the UK has popularized baby-led weaning, or baby-led complementary feeding. This involves offering the baby a variety of foods to choose from intuitively: cooked broccoli florets or carrot strips, steamed fish, omelet strips, or soft pieces of fruit. Many midwives support the concept. Possible benefits include:
- Instinctively, baby-led weaning is designed to help the child reach for foods whose nutrients he or she needs at that moment, the idea goes.
- Through early self-determined eating, baby-led weaning teaches the child from the very beginning when it is full and what is good for it.
A study by the University of Nottingham supports these assumptions. According to the study, baby-led weaning can actually promote healthier eating behavior in children. In addition, thanks to this form of complementary feeding, children are less likely to become overweight later on than children who are given baby porridge.
Baby-led weaning – here’s how it works
In baby-led weaning, the child is always offered a choice of different foods. These must be prepared in such a way that they can be eaten without chewing. The child decides how much to eat. Even if he stops eating early, he is not pushed to eat more.
Criticism of baby-led weaning
But there are also critical voices. The German Association of Pediatricians and Adolescents, for example, rejects baby-led weaning:
- On the one hand, there would be a danger that the child would eat too little because eating is so laborious. Then a malnutrition threatens.
- Babies cannot eat non-pureed meat until molars are also present. Not eating meat can promote an iron deficiency.
- There would also be a risk of the child choking on larger chunks.
In fact, a study by the University of Glasgow found that baby-led weaning as a form of complementary feeding can cause deficiency symptoms.
