Baby Diaries: A Guide for New Mothers Part Seven – Weaning Your Baby

Weaning by no means signals an end to baby needing milk. I have an eleven year old who still has milk at breakfast and a mug full at night. Weaning simply means an end to breast or formula milk as the exclusive diet. Your baby will now be requiring different foods in addition to the milk he/she is having.

There is no set-in-stone age at which an infant must start eating semi-solid foods. Only the parents know their baby, and only they can decide when to start. The guide age to begin weaning baby is between four to six months. My daughters were weaned at about five months old, but my son was ready the day he hit the four-month mark. They were all breastfed, but I knew by the time he was three months old that my body would not be able to sustain him for much longer. He needed something else along with his milk because he was much too hungry.

Points to note when weaning begins

Weaning is a huge milestone in baby’s life (and in yours). It doesn’t work straight away and may take many attempts before baby agrees to let you put something that’s not milk into her/his mouth, so be prepared for this. Obviously, hungry babies may be easier to feed with semi-solids than babies who can’t be bothered too much about food. Here are some notes about weaning that you should pay attention to.

• Choose a moment when both baby and you are relaxed. This will take care and time. Keep in mind that the first few ‘lessons’ are not about any actual eating.
• Baby has to get used to a hard plastic spoon in his/her mouth, and to a strikingly different taste from what they’re used to, so give yourself and them a few rehearsals before any food gets past the oesophagus.
• Prop baby up with adequate support and be armed with tissues and a bib. Don’t try feeding when baby is very hungry because remember they do not know that this new ‘event’ is meant to be a form of food and feeding. This new experience is just something they’re forced to do when all they want is to be fed. Try feeding in-between feeds until baby makes the connection between the food and feeding from it.
• Remember to offer tiny amounts and give your baby enough time to suck the food from the end of the spoon. Keep in mind that it takes a totally different skill to swallow semi-solid foods than it takes to swallow milk sucked from a nipple or a teat.
• Don’t switch to pasteurised milk just because baby is now eating semi-solids. Baby still needs breast or formula milk as their staple feed until they’re about a year old.
• If you’re aware of family history of gluten intolerance, continue to breast feed and don’t give foods containing gluten to baby before he/she is six months old.
• If you start semi-solids too early, baby’s immature digestive system may react adversely to the new foods, giving way to all sorts of food intolerances and allergies as he/she grows older. On the other hand, if you start too late, vitamins and minerals stored in your infant’s body before birth will have diminished, leaving, him/her weak and with vital organs (like the brain) that are unable to grow and develop properly.
• Babies, like all children will have a personal taste. They may not like semi-solids the first time it’s offered to them. This will change, however, so don’t give up on them. Make sure that they have a varied diet at the age where they’re not necessarily looking to see what’s on their plate. Doing it this way will invariably mean less work for you later on. As they get older, offer them foods with different textures because many times the taste may be fine, but the texture of the food, if strange, will be a turn off for your infant. It’s something they have to get used to.

Weaning tools

Personally, I think that all the weaning equipment out there are more or less the same. They all compete with each other, but the manufacturers have all got to operate under approved standards. Buy what you can afford, but make sure that they’re all cleaned well after use. It’s improper and unwise to leave baby’s crockery and cutlery in the sink with the rest of the washing up.