A couple of weeks ago we published the first video of an interview with Carlos Gonzalez made by the Catalan portal Criatures and today we bring a new video in which he talks about the ideal time to start offering complementary food and, at the same time, of how long to breastfeed a baby.
We have commented on several occasions that the ideal time to start offering new foods to babies is from six months. This is because milk (breast or formula) contains all the nutrients and calories necessary for the baby to develop properly until that time.
Offering fruit before six months is not bad, it is unnecessary. The fruit has fewer calories than milk and the baby will have to drink more milk to ingest the ones he needs (or a lot of fruit, although he may not want more than a few tablespoons or just not fit in his small stomach).
Cereals do have more calories than milk, but they are a problem because, as with fruit, cereals are not as complete, nutritionally speaking, as milk.
In other words, nothing happens if they eat fruit or cereals after four months, because the child will grow equally healthy in the eyes of his parents, however it is not necessary to do so, milk is a more complete food and babies, many times, reject the spoon at those ages. If the mother starts working, then there will probably be no other solution, but if there is, It is better to continue with milk until six months.
He has more than ten months and wants nothing more than the chest
Some children, for whatever reason, accept almost no food until 8 or 10 months (or even more).
It is believed that these children are part of those whose nutritional needs are still covered with breast milk, that is, they still do not need extra food.
Accepting or not accepting food is not something we can teach or force. A child will open his mouth, chew, move food to his throat with his tongue and swallow it the day he wants to do it, neither more nor less. It is for this reason that, as Carlos González says, the ideal in these children is that we offer foods rich in iron, since it is almost the only micronutrient that a baby may lack.
At six months you can stop giving it
Personally I think it happens less and less, but maybe I am wrong. When a mother has been breastfeeding for about six months, she begins to receive messages of "enough is enough", "you don't need to give her more time", "you've already passed all the defenses" and similar.
As at six months it is recommended to start offering other foods because breast milk, by itself, (and artificial milk, of course), does not cover all the requirements of babies, many people think that, directly, it passes Be a secondary or tertiary food.
The reality is that breast milk remains the main food until the year of life and all it requires is a little complementation for the subject of iron and zinc. In fact, if a woman wanted to do it, she could breastfeed exclusively up to two years by supplementing with a few drops of iron and zinc and the child would be perfectly healthy. Another thing would be for the child to want to continue like this, because most likely he would "throw himself" into the food hopelessly.
I do it because I want
We are used to talking about the benefits of breastfeeding, of the damages if they do not take it, of “give it up to two years because it still has defenses” and similar and we often forget the basics: from six months, when a lot people say that there is no need to continue, the mother begins to enjoy breastfeeding like never before.
The baby interacts more with the mother, smiles, looks at him, puts "eyes of pleasure", plays with the tit, etc. A special relationship is established between the mother and the child and the mother's motivation is not simply how healthy breast milk is, but what she enjoys giving it.
As he says Carlos Gonzalez in the video:
The breast is given because you like to give it. If you do not like it, do not give it, and if you like it, what else will it give for the child to have six months, not to have them, to have his defenses passed or not to him?
