The gradual transition from breast milk to eating family foods marks the beginning of your baby’s growing food habits.
What she savours as an infant, dislikes as a toddler will eventually lay the groundwork for her food preferences and healthy eating habits as an adult.
Making a Fresh Start |
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- Begin to offer your baby just about one or two teaspoons of food a day. You could use a small amount of the expressed breast milk to mix the foods to the desired consistency. But keep away from adding any excess amount of sugar or salt to the baby foods.
- Your baby’s position while eating is equally important. Use a high chair with your baby sitting up straight. With this way, exploring different foods will become much easier and it will also minimise on the instances of choking.
- Let your baby feed on her own, at a pace which she finds comfortable to adapt to this new and varied feeding regime. A wide variety would help her distinguish the different texture and taste of foods offered.
- As soon as you observe them to have developed a better grasping reflex, offer small pieces of soft fruits or vegetables which they can easily pick up.
- While using a spoon to feed your baby, make sure that she opens her mouth completely and then gently let her take in the desired amount. Using small bright coloured plastic spoons and bowls would attract your baby’s attention.
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Offer Finger Foods
Your baby doesn’t possess an adult set of teeth at this age to be able to chew on foods with that ease. But don’t refrain either from encouraging some chewing practice, as they begin to hold on to pieces of cooked carrot sticks. Cubes of bread, cheese, cooked and peeled fruits like apple, banana along with soft thin layer of chapatti can also be offered as finger foods.
Encourage Eating as a Family
Let the baby identify and relate her eating patterns with the rest of the family members. Have her as an additional member at the dining table. By cultivating this habit at an age as young as 12 months old, you would help her instil healthy eating skills. |
- You can surely not expect your baby to eat like the others at the table. Her food would differ in consistency.
- Try including the same family foods for your baby in a mashed form or be given as a finger food. Having the same food along with others will help her becoming more familiar with the family eating norms. This would also lessen the chances of her becoming a fussy eater in later life.
- Your baby will sense, when she has had enough. Force-feeding your baby will only add to her discomfort making her crankier then before. So let her stop on her own. Don’t be amazed to see her enjoy the process by spilling, playing, dropping that morsel and simply adding up to the mess. It has to be this way, as they have just begun to learn feeding themselves. Sheets of newspapers or kitchen cloth placed on the floor could be used to clean the area later. You could also loosely tie a soft cotton baby napkin i.e. baby bib around her neck to prevent her from messing up her clothes.
- Useful tip:-Teach your baby to sip in water from a cup along with her meals. While offering fruit juice, dilute it to one part juice to ten parts water and offer only at mealtimes.
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| Coping with Fussy Eaters |
- If you tend to observe that your baby exhibits the traits of a typical fussy eater, ape these to lessen your anxiety.
- Appreciate by a simple applaud, if you see your baby eating well but don’t show your frustration or anger if she doesn’t. Allow her with an ample amount of feeding time. It might be so that she feels comfortable having those small bites easily, a little later.
- Babies find more comfort in familiar foods that are given to them as per their meal timings every day. Introducing a new food will not be an easy task, so don’t worry if it’s been a week and your baby has still not taken to it. At times, you would have to offer them a particular food many times before they actually try it themselves.
- It’s perfectly normal for your baby to eat in less at certain days depending upon her appetite, moods and illness. Treasure the fact, if slowly but steadily she has taken to having different foods over the course of a week.
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Dealing with Allergies
It is likely to observe allergies in babies that have a family history of asthma, Eczema or hay fever. Try to spot an allergy based reaction by introducing one allergy causing food at a time and discuss it with your baby’s doctor. Foods like milk, eggs, wheat, nuts, seeds, fish & soy are commonly causing allergens. It is also found that babies who are allergic to cow’s milk may be allergic to soy as well. In cases of infant formulas, it is wise to introduce a soy based formula only on the advice of the baby’s paediatrician. |
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