For decades, this was the widely accepted way to feed a baby: Sit them in a high chair, pop open a jar of mushy pureed peas, scoop some onto a tiny spoon, make an “open wide” face, and—whoosh—make it fly like an airplane into the baby’s mouth.
No longer. Over the past 10 years or so, a method called “baby-led weaning” has caught on among many parents. Its proponents claim that infants don’t need to be spoon-fed baby food. In fact, they don’t need to be spoon-fed anything. Parents should give them big hunks of real food to paw at and chomp on as soon as they’re ready to start solids, even if they have only one or two teeth. Just throw an entire broccoli crown or chicken drumstick at your six-month-old and see what they do with it. (The process is called “weaning” because as the baby eats more solids, they’re supposed to drink progressively less breast milk or formula.) By following this method, you can supposedly reduce the risk that your child will grow up to be a fussy eater or an obese adult.
I was drawn to baby-led weaning in part because, as a sometime health reporter, I was concerned about childhood obesity. Baby-led weaning also seemed somehow more natural and pure. It didn’t involve Big Baby Food. And it was a way of trusting my baby to know what he needs because he is smart and advanced.
Still, as I prepared my then-six-month-old son’s first plate of solid food, I didn’t want to start with a T-bone. I decided to test the waters with something pretty soft. Following a recipe from a popular app called Solid Starts, I stirred a little ground turkey into some sweet potato and put it on my son’s tray. Tentatively, he put the clump in his mouth. Within seconds, he gagged so hard that he threw up all over himself. Mealtime ended with him crying and getting hosed off.
This process repeated itself with every food we tried, until a few months in, when he “progressed” to taking bites of food and then promptly spitting them out. We watched with alarm as our son turned 10 months, and then 11, mere weeks from the age—12 months—when he was supposed to stop drinking formula and start getting nearly all of his nutrition from food. Except he was consuming, generously, 50 calories of food a day.
My husband and I didn’t know what to do. The internet is so awash in posts and videos about baby-led weaning that I wasn’t sure how to adapt when the method didn’t work. Our pediatrician had not previously been helpful in matters of feeding, so we didn’t ask her. Instead, I reached out to baby-feeding experts, who said that if baby-led weaning fails, spoon-feeding your baby mashed-up or pureed food is fine. I also came away from these interviews with the impression that baby-led weaning has less evidence behind it than its supporters claim—and that like many newfangled, internet-supercharged baby trends, it has the effect of encouraging parents to make raising children way too hard for themselves.
Baby-led weaning was pioneered more than two decades ago by Gill Rapley, a British public-health nurse. As she visited families who were introducing solid foods to their babies, she noticed that some babies resisted being spoon-fed. The parents thought the babies didn’t like the food they were offering, but Rapley suspected they didn’t enjoy the process. She would suggest that those parents give their babies large pieces of food to hold instead. “And they would do that,” she told me in an interview, “and it would solve the problem.”
In her 2008 book on baby-led weaning, which has sold more than 100,000 copies—a sizable number for a book of this type—Rapley writes that as babies need more nutrients, they will eat more purposefully, as though the baby “instinctively knows that he actually needs this food.” She asserts that the method promotes greater “satiety awareness,” which means a baby-led baby “may be less likely to overeat when they are older.” She writes that the method carries no greater risk of choking than spoon-feeding because the baby is in control of what’s in his mouth, and recommends treating the baby almost like an honored dinner guest, suggesting that you should even avoid wiping a baby’s face between mouthfuls.
Baby-led weaning really came into vogue after the 2019 launch of the Brooklyn-based Solid Starts, which features recipes and tips for serving whole foods to infants of different ages. Though parents can simply buy Rapley’s book, many parents seem to learn the technique through the influencers, programs, and apps they find online. Half a dozen pediatricians and infant-feeding experts I spoke with said many patients ask them about the practice, usually after seeing it on social media. Solid Starts has 3.7 million followers on Instagram (more than the 3.6 million babies born in the U.S. in 2022) and millions of downloads. One speech therapist who frequently posts baby-led-weaning tips on TikTok has nearly a quarter-million followers. An assortment of baby-led-weaning Facebook groups each has tens of thousands of members who post pictures of their infants slamming down plates of sausage and pasta. Many of the instructions for how to deploy the method come at a price. One program costs $247, another is $59, and Solid Starts is $20 a month. One specialist offers four months of pediatric “nutrition coaching” for $999.
The tone of pro-baby-led-weaning posts is enthusiastic verging on evangelistic: The speech therapist argues in a video that it’s spoon-feeding, not baby-led weaning, that increases the risk of choking. Moms post time-lapse videos of themselves crinkle-cutting carrots, then steaming them, then burning their fingers as they put them through the “squish” test (if it’s squishable, it’s safe to feed a baby). They post videos of their nine-month-olds eagerly chomping on pork chops, or of slightly older babies eating daintily with a fork. “If you want this,” the text reads, “you have to go through this”—a clip of the same baby messily shoveling yogurt into his mouth.
All of this content has the effect of making baby-led weaning seem like the only thing you should do. “There’s all these things on the internet, and it’s like, you must be a bad parent if you don’t do baby-led,” Mark Corkins, the chair of the nutrition committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told me.
As our own baby-led failures started to pile up, I did feel like a bad parent. But as I looked at the science behind this practice more closely, I started to wonder if I was truly failing, or if baby-led weaning is just not all it’s cracked up to be.
Baby-led weaning is billed as “easy” because you’re supposed to be able to offer the baby whatever you’re eating. Some parents do find this approach appealing: One representative comment on Solid Starts’ Instagram page reads, “Feeding our baby the same meals as we eat … is the best thing ever. Introduces her to so many foods and also saves us time and money!”
I do not share this enthusiasm, though, because babies can’t eat many of the things adults do. According to most experts, babies under a year old can’t have sugar, honey, unpasteurized or raw cheese, raw seafood, processed or ready-made meals, or additional salt. Rapley also recommends that you avoid artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, sweeteners, and soy milk. Good luck finding a food in America that doesn’t contain at least one of those things. At one point in her book, Rapley, echoing other baby-feeding experts, suggests that babies avoid certain kinds of tuna, but then recommends that at a restaurant, you share with the baby your meal of a “baked potato with tuna” (coming to a Chili’s menu near you!).
At home, I’m almost never eating something that’s suitable for a baby. Most days for dinner, I have a big salad with thick, crunchy kale; nuts of some kind; and an unpasteurized cheese—none of which is okay for babies. (“Salads are not great for young children,” Rapley acknowledged.) I often serve the salad alongside a salty, spicy pasta dish, but babies aren’t supposed to have salt. Rapley told me you can just add salt later, to your own plate—which would mean that you’re boiling pasta in unsalted water and searing an unsalted chicken breast for you to eat, and for your little one to gnaw on.
Plus, what you’re getting in exchange for this flavor-free lifestyle is not totally clear. The biggest purported benefit of baby-led weaning is that allowing babies to “tune into their bodies,” as Rapley puts it, may help prevent obesity later in life. But this has turned out to not be quite right: Many studies on this question find no difference in weight between babies who are baby-led-weaned versus spoon-fed.
Rapley also claims that children who are baby-led, rather than spoon-fed, become less finicky eaters. Some experts I spoke with agreed with this assessment, but one small study found that baby-led weaning made no difference in picky eating. One childhood-obesity researcher, Rachael Taylor of the University of Otago, in New Zealand, told me that a main benefit of baby-led weaning seems to be that it makes parents feel good: “When you talk to parents who like it,” she said, “they love it.”
That’s if their babies will do it. Another claim of baby-led-weaning proponents is that whether the baby eats much of anything doesn’t matter; just licking or gumming the food and spitting it out is okay. When I asked Rapley what to do if your baby still isn’t eating enough solid food by the time they turn 1, she suggested that allowing the baby to continue to drink formula might be fine.
But infant-feeding experts told me not to do this; they said that babies should be eating lots of actual food by 12 months. If they’re not, Corkins said, “you should have bailed on baby-led a lot sooner.” Another feeding researcher, Charlotte Wright at the University of Glasgow, suggested that families who practice baby-led weaning should combine finger foods with spoon-feeding to ensure that their babies are eating enough.
Mark Fishbein, who runs a pediatric feeding clinic at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, told me he wouldn’t recommend baby-led weaning to most families. “There may be some benefit, maybe,” he said, “but the risks are much higher.” Infants doing baby-led weaning gag frequently, which, according to Fishbein, occasionally triggers a feeding aversion that can cause the baby to shun all foods, from a spoon or otherwise. (Rapley acknowledged that excessive gagging “can indeed be a bad thing,” but said that it generally correlates with an underlying problem that baby-led weaning exposes, rather than causes.) When I mentioned a common baby-led food suggestion, a whole piece of meat, to Dina DiMaggio, a pediatrics professor at NYU, she said, “I get worried about things like that”—because big, tough pieces of food can pose a choking risk.
Still, most experts I spoke with said that baby-led weaning can be a reasonable thing for normally developing babies to try, but that parents of kids with delays or medical issues should proceed with caution. (Rapley has released a companion book geared toward parents of kids with disabilities, claiming that baby-led weaning can work for them, too—though with a “transitional phase” that involves purees or mashed foods.)
The upshot seems to be that baby-led weaning is fine if it works for your kid, but that the “traditional” way—spoon-feeding your baby—is also fine. That’s not the impression many parents get, though. “My patients, their parents are very concerned,” DiMaggio told me. They’re just doing baby-led weaning “because some influencer said to do it.” In this way, the evangelizing for baby-led weaning has come to resemble some of the proselytizing for breastfeeding and unmedicated childbirth and so many other things that are supposedly free and easy and best for your baby, but can be anything but for the parents.
Granted, mine is the only baby I’ve ever interacted with at length, but I’ve come to the conclusion that he should not be leading his own weaning. He should not, frankly, be leading anything, because he is—and I say this with all the love in my heart—not that smart. He thinks the trash can is awesome. He doesn’t realize that I don’t die when I go to the bathroom. He believes the Roomba is sentient. He does not, unfortunately, instinctively understand how to eat a diet rich in varied macronutrients, in order to perfectly complement his formula feeds in an age-appropriate way. That’s my job, and I’m going to lead him through it.
The post How the Internet Ruined Feeding Babies appeared first on The Atlantic.
