How to Start Baby-Led Weaning

Welcoming a new member of the family can have its blissful moments (all-day snuggles and baby smiles come to mind), but it can also be a recipe for overwhelm, especially when you’re a first-time parent.

If you think that your baby is ready to start solid foods, baby-led weaning may be the way to make the transition a bit easier. We spoke to Pediatric Nutritionist Nicole Silber to get her best tips for starting baby-led weaning.

What Is Baby-Led Weaning?

Baby-led weaning is a method of introducing solid food that skips over the purée and spoon-feeding stages, relying solely on the baby’s natural instinct to feed themselves. The term was originally coined in 2005 by Gill Rapley, a public health nurse in the United Kingdom. It offers a variety of benefits, like letting babies be in full control of their eating, to pace themselves, and choose how much they want to eat. “Babies pick up their food and feed themselves, which allows them to experience food using touch, and also helps to boost hand-mouth coordination and babies’ palm and pincer grasps,” Silber shares. “It’s great to allow them to use all their senses.” Another benefit of baby-led weaning is allowing parents to share their food with their babies, which means you can skip the added step of blending and puréeing ingredients to make “baby food.”

5 Best Baby-Led Weaning Tips

Before getting started, here are a few tried-and-true tips to remember throughout the process.

1. Embrace the mess. Parents should know up front that adopting baby-led weaning might lead to more of a mess at the table as little ones explore. “Embracing the mess now can go a long way towards having a child who looks forward to mealtime in the long term,” Silber notes. (Incidentally, this is also true if you choose to do traditional purée feeding.)
2. Incorporate purées. It’s a misconception that you can’t include purées while following a baby-led weaning diet. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Silber says. “There may be foods that lend themselves better to be a purée like applesauce or yogurts, and foods that are better for baby-led weaning like scrambled eggs or bread.”
3. Rethink “finger foods.” While most people assume the foods offered in baby-led weaning should be cut into bite-sized pieces to prevent choking, most babies do well with larger pieces of food (about the length of an adult pinky finger to accommodate their palm grasp) starting at around six months old. According to Silber, “most babies only develop their pincer grasps a few months into the feeding journey, at which time they learn how to pick up smaller pieces of food, similar to the size you will find [with] most Simple Starters ingredients.”
4. Remember that gagging is normal. It’s common for parents to confuse choking with gagging. “When babies gag, it’s their way of protecting their airways,” Silber reassures. Their gag reflex is actually farther forward in the mouth when babies begin solids, and moves back as they age. “While it doesn’t look pleasant to see, there’s nothing wrong with starting with traditional purées and progressing to table foods as babies show they’re ready.”
5. Invite everyone to the table. Baby-led weaning is a wonderful way to include the whole family at meal times. “Babies learn so much by watching and then mimicking mealtime behavior they see from their parents and siblings,” Silber says. “Bring the highchair right up to the table, and have your baby join the fun!”

Something else to remember about baby-led weaning is that it might not be for every baby or parent, and that’s more than OK. Silber is quick to note that there’s nothing wrong with feeding babies with traditional purées and adapting some of the baby-led weaning concepts to your family, like letting babies explore their foods and honoring their hunger and fullness cues. Bottom line: use what works for you, experiment as needed, and don’t worry about the rest. Fed is always best!