What is Baby-Led Weaning (BLW)?

Baby-Led Weaning (BLW) is the best way to introduce babies to solid foods. It emphasizes self-feeding methods for children. Instead of spoon-feeding, different types of food are prepared and offered to children to eat at their own pace. In this way, children’s relationship with their food becomes even stronger.

Importance of Introducing First Foods

Introducing children to first foods plays an important role in their mental and physical development. Because of this, their eating habits and dietary preferences stay with them throughout their lives.
(BLW) helps children understand their hunger cues. This allows the child’s mind to adapt to different flavors and textures due to which their body skills increase 100 times.

Understanding Baby-Led Weaning (BLW)

Definition and ConceptBaby

At Baby-Led Weaning(BLW) babies begin their weaning journey by introducing them to solid foods. Instead of spoon feeding, parents should divide the food into small pieces so that they try to pick up the food at their own pace. This increases both the child’s control over food intake and his desire to eat.

History and Origins

The concept of BLW consists of weaning children through traditional methods and practices which is adopted in different ways in different cultures of the world. It gained greater recognition in the 2000s due to the work of British health visitor Gill Ripley.Through her publications and research, we learned about the benefits of allowing children to eat.

Benefits of BLW

BLW offers numerous benefits, including:

1. Enhanced body skills:                      

Children voluntarily pick up food, sometimes chow down, sometimes manipulate it, increasing their hand-eye coordination, which increases physical skills.

2. Better appetite control:

We understand children by their hunger and their fullness cues, which helps us prevent them from overeating.

3. Positive eating habits:

In the beginning, children are offered a variety of nutritious foods to have a positive impact on nutrition.

4. Reduced mealtime stress:

Parents should always eat food with their children because our children like the same food we like to eat which makes our family bond even stronger.

Getting Started with BLW

Signs Your Baby is Ready for BLW

Every baby’s BLW age is different There are some signs that let us know if our baby is ready for BLW or not. When children begin to sit with little or no support babies try to reach for food by themselves and show interest in eating by putting food in their mouths. When we start to see good hand-to-mouth coordination in our children. When babies try to move their food to the back of their mouth to swallow, they lose their tongue reflex.

How to Prepare for BLW

Some necessary steps should be tak

1. Educate yourself:                       We should read books, articles, and some reliable resources written on BLW.

2. Gather supplies:                   We should provide our children with high chair soft and high grip, easy to eat food, bibs, and a clean place.

3. Plan meals:                       We should make sure that we have a variety of nutritious foods to offer our children at meal times.

   Creating a Safe Eating Environment

   Before starting BLW we should take care of some important things to make the food environment safe

   1.       We should always feed our children under our supervision.

   2.      We should always cut food into appropriate sizes and shapes for children so that it does not get stuck in their throat while swallowing.       3