Babies eat milk, or drink milk, as you want to say. Then, after six months, they start eating other things and tell the theory or tell us, with the usual recommendations, that it is best to start with crushed food, with porridge, to swallow it without chewing, as they do with the milk
However, the more time passes and the more I learn about breastfeeding and breastfeeding children, the more I realize that most children, if we let them, would go "from the tit to the macaroni". In fact, many already do it with a habitual (or direct) hint, which consists of trapping the crushed in their mouth and spitting it out. ipso facto In plan, and how is this chewed?
Breastfeeding prepares chewing
It seems incredible, but it is not. Breastfeeding, the way milk is sucked from a mother's breast, prepares the baby to then be able to chew the food, even without teeth. Of course, we are not talking about giving the child a piece of hard bread and expecting him to chew it, but soft things like pieces of ripe fruit, fish and even soft meat can be handled well.
The muscles that a baby uses to breastfeed are the same ones he will use to eat, so by doing one thing, he is learning to do the other. Those muscles are the masseter, the temporal and the pterygoid as main muscles, accompanied by other accessories that also move at the time of sucking and chewing.
In Babies and more The AEP says yes (for the first time) to the BLW in its recommendations for complementary feedingThose main muscles become strong as the baby sucks from his mother's chest. In addition, the gesture of breastfeeding makes the lower jaw, which at birth is shorter than the upper one, gradually progressing from the distance of 1 cm behind, to the correct position, which reaches six months.
Breastfeeding prepares the flavors
As breast milk also takes on the taste of what the mother eats, babies get different flavors through milk. Dimmed flavors, obviously, because they intermingle with many things, but flavors that the baby can later recognize and accept more easily, for having tried them before (if the mother has eaten what she then offers, of course).
In Babies and more13 recipes to start making Baby Led Weaning with which your baby will suck your fingersSix months arrive and porridge arrives
Then it turns out that the six months arrive and instead of taking advantage of the fact that babies already know how to chew and that they already know many flavors to give them food separately, we make multi-food, crushed porridge, so that they do not have to chew and with so many flavors inside that it is difficult to isolate them minimally.
What if I don't know how many fruits inside, if I don't know how many vegetables with meat, that if I have porridge with eight cereals flavored with cao cola, honey or fruits, what if ...
And one then asks: is all this necessary? Are we not complicating our existence too much? Because hey, in ancient times there were no supermarkets with baby porridge, or hydrolyzed or dextrinated cereals, or crusher. There was food and the baby put it in his mouth. At best, if it was something very hard, the mother chewed it a little beforehand and then put it slowly in the baby's mouth. And maybe everything was easier, right?
From the tit to the macaroni
Of course, they certainly did not eat their heads with food so much and they certainly did not have a photocopied sheet hooked with a magnet to the fridge where there were a lot of instructions to get the child to eat.
I think they kept breastfeeding as usual and simply, when the baby accepted the food, they were giving him. They probably did it at the same time the adults ate, because the example is a very powerful weapon and because since they ate, they gave the little one. Nobody told them to take a breastfeeding to feed them, they simply gave both.
In Babies and more Baby-led Weaning and choking hazard: children who eat chunks are no longer in dangerAnd so it should be today too, because complementary feeding should not get a baby to stop breastfeeding practically, as many pediatricians suggest, which reduce breastfeeding to two doses per day, getting (if the mothers would listen, I doubt it), They drink much less milk than they need.
The breast milk is the best food there is, so there is no reason to belittle her after six months, but quite the opposite. We must continue to give it the merit and the importance it deserves and simply add new foods so that the diet is diversified and so that the baby, little by little, goes from the milk to the food of the elderly, because little by little it is getting older (and little by little it's a matter of reaching twelve months still with breast milk as the main food).
How to do it then?
So in the end, if you ask me how to do it, I answer with a: naturally. We have the child at an age when he is curious about food, stays seated and is able to take food with his hands and put it in his mouth (about 6-8 months). Breast frequently and it is time to eat. We all sit at the table and give him some of what we have.
As we know we are going to give it, we have already made the food a bit adapted, or we have set aside something before spicing it up. At that moment we give it the ingredient to eat a little. As he has not tried, we never wait for a whole day without giving him anything else and, if he wakes up the next day, without allergy symptoms, we consider that It suits him and we can give it back when we want. On the second day, we offer you another food that you have never tried and, if we want, also that of the previous day at the same time or at another time of the day.
In Babies and more Nutrition experts warn that parents take a long time to offer uncrushed food to babiesAnd so we are adding food every day, with the only recommendation to leave for 12 months leafy vegetables (chard, spinach, lettuce ...), which capture too many nitrites from the soil, milk and dairy products (because they are high in protein and low in iron), seafood, which accumulates a lot of mercury (up to 2-3 years) and avoids everything that is small and hard.
And it has no more secret. Offer and have the baby take it and put it in the mouth. He will chew it, he will drool it, he will spit it out, another piece will be swallowed, he will swallow it, a third party maybe appealing to him, then he will make an "ajjjjj" and take it out of his throat, learning not to put it so deep in the next time. Sometimes you will even keep the "ajjj" held until we put the finger to remove it, because it will have left something stuck to the palate.
And it will be eating the same as us and he will do, because we will feel responsible, that we decide to eat more varied and better, so that he also eats more varied and better.
Thus, with patience, little by little, breast milk will be supplemented with other foods, without the need to get used to the porridge and not to chew and then take them off and get used to something else, which is real food, again chewing again , when they were ready for it.
