Helping your baby love food - in a single page!

Food gives your baby’s little body the good quality nutrition necessary for her growth. But food is not only for nutrition, food is about enjoyment and coming together as family or community! We want your baby to enjoy the foods that your family normally eats, from your own cultural background. We come together over food with people we care about, to enjoy the taste of interesting types of foods, to have fun, to share of our lives and our news, to care for each other. If our human connection is the focus, faciliated by a wonderful variety of nutritious foods, then your baby will quickly learn that food is enjoyable, relaxed, and no fuss!

If are parents we're feeling very worried about doing it right - for instance, according to the many instructions that you'll find on the internet about how to control your baby's transition onto solids - if we feel it's our job to get in the correct amounts of nutrients or antigens, everything can accidentally backfire. We can find that the whole thing becomes stressful for both you and your baby, which actually puts your baby at increased risk of feeding problems such as becoming very picky.

Here are the best ways to help your baby love food, in a single simple page.

• Prepare your little one for patterns of happy wholesome eating by establishing patterns of enjoyable, relaxed (also frequent if often quite irregular) interactions over food. Live life in the midst of an abundance of casual food offers. These are best not being highly structured or regulated.

• Babies learn how to eat by watching others around them eat, and by experimenting with a wide variety of textures and tastes, in the midst of a life rich in sensory motor adventures.

• Lots of fresh or lightly cooked fruit and vegetables, even from infancy, are best for the human gut, gut microbiome, and health. It's not good for your baby to eat sweet, salty, or highly refined foods - but we don't have to be obsessive about eliminating all traces of salt and sugar, either. That makes it all too hard.

• Offer a wide range of tastes and textures without any particular pattern, just from your family’s usual diet. This is the best way to build your baby's immunity for (or ability to cope with) different foods.

• There is no need for graduated introduction of foods which are labelled as allergens, or for recording new foods your baby has tried. This just makes life more complicated than it needs to be, without any true benefit.

Parents provide, bubby decides!

The saying that ‘parents provide, child decides’ is the best approach to take. This means giving your baby choice.

• Let your baby be in control of her eating. Have lots of opportunities for taste and play with a whole range of tastes and textures, without pressure to eat. Experimentation with the feel, texture and taste of solids is a vital way your little one develops a positive relationship with food. One of the big mistakes we made as health professionals in the past was to make parents feel pressured to get food into their baby. Now we know that pressuring a baby to eat can set up stress and distress in your baby’s relationship with food long-term, which we definitely want to avoid.

• Be ready for mess! Try to allow mess a lot of the time, even if you don’t have the strength to face a clean-up every time. Making a mess is a normal part of your baby developing a relationship with food. Some days you might not have much energy for the clean-up and you’ll try to keep it contained. But overall, it’s best to set it up so there's no problem if your little one makes a big, delicious mess.

• Sometimes you might offer food mashed up or pureed on a spoon, although your baby might want to take over. The main thing is to make sure your baby doesn’t ever feel under pressure to take it. Other times you might give you baby a finger food suitable for holding.

• Always watch a little one who is learning to eat. Keep baby sitting upright (propped in your lap or in the high chair). That doesn’t mean that your baby necessarily has to be able to sit up entirely on their own, before you start offering solids to try.

• Don't add salt to your baby's food, either when you are preparing or serving it. But you also don't need to eliminate all salt from everything you offer her, either. That just causes unnecessary worry and work, without protecting your baby, because your (otherwise healthy) baby's kidneys are more than capable of dealing with small amounts of salt.

• Keep offering a food even if baby doesn’t seem interested at first. Lots of offers over time allow your baby to experiment with a wide range of foods and to get used to them.

• You can find out about how to keep your baby's airways safe as you start solids, and the difference between gagging and choking, here.

Recommended resources

When is your baby ready for solids?

What's the difference between gagging and choking?

Things to avoid with infants and foods

Iron rich foods for your baby

Acknowledgements

I'm grateful to Professor Sophie Havighurst, Ros June, and Caroline Ma at Mindful, The University of Melbourne, for their feedback on the articles and videos in Little people + food.

Selected references

Borowitz SM. First bites - why, when, and what solid foods to feed infants. Frontiers in Pediatrics. 2021;9:654171.