It is a messy way to have a baby eat, but the rewards of watching your infant develop skills with food at a rapid pace make it all worthwhile. Sarah loves eating food and will eat anything with gusto that is placed in front of her. When I do spoon feed her, she practically attacks the spoon to get the food, making me worried I will accidentally hurt her!
In only a 4-week span, her self-feeding skills are developing quickly. She clearly knows what meals are for and eagerly eyes up her food as she waits for it to be given to her. In fact, I feel she now notices when I am eating around her but not feeding her too! She now has 100% accuracy of reaching, grabbing and bringing the food to her mouth. She is already able to pick up smaller pieces of food, even without yet reaching that developmental milestone of the “pincer grasp”. I am again amazed (as I was with Elizabeth) at how skilled a baby actually is in managing real food. She has yet to have any episodes of gagging. Instead, she calmly pushes out of her mouth the pieces of food that she cannot yet manage to chew and swallow. Most often food is sucked on first, which either disintegrates it to the point where she can swallow it, or she pushes out the remnants.
This second time of using this approach to feeding an infant has only further convinced me that it is a great way to introduce solid food to a baby.
1. I like that it takes the priority off of feeding certain amounts of food to a baby. There is no need to make a baby eat, for example, 3 more spoonfuls, to empty the baby food jar. At this age, the majority of nutrients still come from the milk and food, therefore, the approach emphasizes that food is a “toy” and a thing to experience, discover and enjoy. This is probably the most helpful thing for me, because my personality would stress about making a baby finish x number of jars of baby food each day. I still stress at times about if they get enough food…but thankfully a lot less this second time!
2. Introducing food is fun! There is no strict schedule about when and in what order each type of food can be introduced. This relaxed approach is also enabled because J and I have no food allergies, so research shows that the risk of our children having an allergy is minimal. Plus, the experts now say that if solids are introduced past 6 months of age, a baby’s system is so much more mature and able to manage all types of food. There are definite foods to avoid – nuts, for example. But all that to say, Sarah eats what we eat (usually). I keep her salt to a minimum, so I will sometimes prepare veggies for her in a separate pot. At this age, when she still only picks up food with a open fisted grab, she does better with sticks of steamed veggies instead of small pieces. But in general, our food is her food, just sometimes cut or presented in a different way. 
3. I have no way to prove this, but I believe it helps create adventurous eaters. Elizabeth is not a picky eater. She has days when she is less interested in eating, but we never hear her say she doesn’t like something. She just isn’t hungry! Maybe it is our family’s culture at the dinner table. J is the least picky eater I know and his habits have rubbed off on me…and on our family as a whole. Maybe it is because we never say to her “don’t you like it?” and therefore she has never learned this behavior or this excuse? But I think it is also because she has eaten a wide variety of food with a wide range of textures from the beginning. When thinking about the food habits we wanted for our children, the one thing we did not want was to create this idea of a separate category of “kid food”. As a result, Elizabeth eats olives, curry, salmon, etc. And Sarah is well on her way to eating all of this too. As a funny side note, a friend of ours who works in our church’s nursery recently said to me “You don’t eat hotdogs very often, do you?”. She went on to explain that when Elizabeth was playing with a toy hot dog in the nursery, she insisted it was a piece of red pepper despite our friend telling her it was really a hot dog. Indeed…we have never fed her a hot dog so no wonder she did not recognize it.
4. Baby led weaning is easy! There are times when it is easier to feed Sarah with a spoon (depending on the food). Yogurt is just too messy (in my opinion) for a baby to self feed. But at the end of these food sessions I am reminded of how much time it takes to feed a baby food and how difficult it is to do it while trying to eat at the same time. With baby led weaning, Sarah sits at the table with us and eats with us. We have to supervise, but basically she does it on her own. And this leads me to my last point…
5. Baby led weaning helps develop table manners at an early age. Again, I can’t conclusively say that Elizabeth’s table manners are purely a result of baby led weaning. Again, there are so many factors that go into developing table manners. But, having our babies sit with us at the dinner table and join us from the age of 6 months certainly contributes to good manners. Sarah is already learning to wait for her food while we sing and pray. She is already becoming accustomed to dinner conversation and will become increasingly more of an active participant as she gains language skills. She is learning how to sit with us at the table, even when she is finished and no longer very hungry. Elizabeth has been a delight to take to restaurants with us from an early age. She is happy to sit with us at the dinner table for extended periods of time (as long as we are sure to include her in the conversation). I truly believe that these behaviors come from our including her in our family meals from the very beginning.
So yes, I love baby led weaning! But honestly, I am also looking forward to moving past these exceptionally messy early days of eating!
