I have recently been told that health visitors in Manchester promote so called ‘baby led weaning’ to parents, however when I worked in Lewisham, NHS London was not. Rather, they were giving it as an option.
Weaning came up in the news again recently with more questions about whether exclusive breastfeeding to 6 month is advisable or not, and whether spoon fed weaning can make more children obese. The latter was a very small study of 155 children of a wide range of ages (20 months – 6 years) carried out by the University of Nottingham. Logic says this is far too small. Surely it depends on what you give your child on the spoon, whether you combine spoon feeding with finger foods etc.
An even small study on my son alone, says that spoon fed weaning can also produce a child who would rather eat peas, sweetcorn or peppers than anything else on his plate. We just avoided chocolate, biscuits, cake and other high added sugar foods until he was well over 1. He still only has them as a treat.
I wonder what others think about this study….?