Feeding Baby from 6-12 Months

Each week Naomi (Infant Feeding Specialist, CLC) shares a tip to help you navigate your infants' feeding journey.

Moving from liquids to solids: what is the best timing

Lots of people are curious about how things change once Baby reaches six months and can start solids. You can think of six months and twelve months as bookends, where one end is a fully liquid milk diet, and the other end is a fully solid food diet - but the space in the middle is a trajectory that moves from one to the other at a different pace for each individual baby! Some babies are SO into solid foods and gobble everything up that you put in front of them. Some babies side-eye everything, delicately picking up each piece of food and throwing it on the floor for months. A lot of babies are somewhere in between. There’s no wrong pace, as long as they are gradually increasing the amount of food and decreasing the amount of calories by milk as they head towards twelve months. They will also be able to fill some of their hydration needs from water via a sippy cup during this time. 

Physical cues to indicate that your baby is ready to eat finger foods

First, the reason all professional bodies (American Academy of Pediatrics, World Health Organization and UNICEF) recommend six months to start solids is because babies don’t need any other nutrition besides human milk or formula before that age, and the physical ability to consume solids depends on a few safety benchmarks that most babies reach by six months. Babies should be sitting independently, hold their head up with full control, and be able to move food from the front of their mouth to the back and swallow, which takes some coordination. (It also takes practice for all of them at the beginning, but there is some development that needs to occur first). This is all very important to make sure babies are less likely to choke. Additionally, you want to see that babies are interested in food - watching you eat, maybe even reaching for your food! They will generally have doubled their birth weight and be around 13 pounds or more when they are ready to start solids.

Introduce one type of new food at a time

Your pediatrician should give you some guidance about this around the 4-6 month visit so you will have more information in hand. The most important thing to keep in mind as you start with solids is that you begin with just one food at a time, introducing something new like sweet potatoes or banana that is not mixed with anything else, and then you give it 2 or 3 days to make sure there is no allergic reaction. Then you can introduce another new food. Once a new food is introduced and accepted, foods can be combined. But anytime you’re introducing something for the first time, try to do that for just a few days to make sure you know whether it is tolerated. 

What method works best for you... making or buying baby food

As far as methods of feeding go, there are so many to choose from, and guess what - they’re all great! If you’d like to make your own baby food, it’s not hard to steam one sweet potato and mash it up, it will last probably a week and that’s great. If you’d like to do Baby Led Weaning, where babies are offered whole, soft foods and not spoon-fed or given purees, that’s really great too! If you like pouches because they are so convenient for your season of life (they are a total godsend for diaper bags, the car, travel in general), go for it! If you want to buy all your baby food in jars, there are some amazing combinations of foods out there that would take a million years to prepare at home and babies really like them, so that’s such a good idea, too! If you would like to do a little of all of these approaches, picking and choosing what works best for you at different times of the day/week/month, that sounds very reasonable. Remember what you have already learned so far in parenting, which is that there is no one-size-fits-all birth or feeding approach, or experience, or book, and what works for one baby doesn’t always work for yours. Stay flexible and non judgmental and follow your instincts. 

Babies will snack throughout the day

Eventually, as babies get more and more interested in food and more coordinated at consuming it, they’ll go from trying foods just once or twice a day to having solids at three meals a day just like you. You will go from mostly giving them milk (either from nursing or bottles) with some solids, to mostly solids with some nursing or bottles, often at quiet times like early morning, before or after naps, and before bedtime. And then there are snacks throughout the day as well. This is another reason you might not want to rush introducing solids until six months - once you open the Pandora’s box of food with babies, you’ll turn into a walking vending machine…be prepared to hand over the snacks at any moment for the next several years!

~ Naomi, Infant Feeding Expert*

*If you need help to schedule your bundled lactation appointment with Naomi…email Elizabeth Parish.