When To Start Weaning ?

Starting the journey of weaning a baby can be an exciting and at times overwhelming for any parent. This post aims to equip you with the knowledge you need to anticipate what lies ahead and prepare for this exciting next phase together. First, let's ensure both you and your baby are ready for weaning and introducing allergens.

What is weaning?

Weaning is the process of moving your baby from a milk-only diet breast fed or formula, that provides the sole source of nutrition for babies. To a complex diet including lots of foods and ingredients, similar to what we eat as adults. Weaning onto solid foods is also a huge learning process for babies, that involves the development of many new skills, including biting, chewing, hand-eye coordination and beginning to use utensils. By the age of 1, babies should be eating a fairly complex diet with a wide variety of foods and ideally can easily join in with your own family foods, with some minor adaptations.

When is my baby ready for solid foods?

The most important factor when deciding when to introduce your baby to solid foods, is looking out for the developmental signs of readiness. As with everything, all babies develop at different rates, and they will all be developmentally ready for weaning at different times. Most babies are consistently showing signs of readiness by around 6 months, this is what current advice is based on. Some babies may be showing signs earlier than this, and in those cases, it may be appropriate to start weaning earlier, with advice from a health care professional.

The 3 main signs of readiness for your baby to start solid foods are:

•  One: They can stay in a sitting position and hold their head steady.

• Two: They can co-ordinate their eyes, hands and mouth so they can look at the food, pick it up and put it in their mouth, all by themselves.

• Three: The baby can swallow food. Babies who are not ready will push their food back out with their tongue, so they get more round their face than they do in their mouths.

Other common signs may include showing interest in your food, chewing their fists or having more of an appetite for milk. You may notice other signs that seem to suggest that your baby is ready but it’s important to look out for the 3 main signs, ideally happening together, and on more than one occasion to be sure that your baby is ready.

What is a safe food?

It's important to build a good food repertoire before moving into allergen weaning. This means your baby has successfully been introduced to several foods it is advised to start with pureed vegetables such as broccoli, courgette, avocado, spinach, and potato before introducing a sweeter taste from fruit. This allows your baby to get used to exploring the taste and textures of different foods. Across our resources, we refer to "Safe foods" These are foods that you have introduced to your baby with no signs or symptoms of an allergic reaction. It is important to remember that someone can be allergic to any food not just the top allergens most common allergens. 

Top Allergens: 

• cows' milk
• eggs
• peanuts, soybeans, peas and chickpeas
• sesame seed
• tree nuts, such as walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, cashews, pistachios & brazil nuts
• shellfish, such as prawns, crab and lobster
• wheat

For best results with using the Baby, are you nuts? The organic allergen weaning test kit looks to begin allergen weaning when your baby is enjoying eating and most likely to consume most or a few teaspoons of the food. They may at this point have a favourite food or meal that they devour every time, this would be the ideal time and way to introduce allergens.  All babies are different so this may be a week into starting weaning or a month later. It's important not to delay allergen weaning, 6 -10 months is the ideal time frame to introduce allergens. NHS guidelines suggest allergen weaning and regular exposure of allergens into your babies diet before 1 year old.  

What is allergen introduction?

Once you have introduced a variety of solid foods successfully to your baby's diet as discussed above, you can now begin to introduce the top allergen foods that can trigger allergic reactions. You need to introduce these one at a time and serve them in combination with already accepted "safe foods" in very small amounts so that you can spot any reaction.

If your baby already has an allergy, such as a diagnosed food allergy or eczema,  you need to be particularly careful when introducing foods. Talk to your GP or health visitor first.

Once introduced and if tolerated, these foods should become part of your baby's usual diet to minimise the risk of allergy. Evidence has shown that delaying the introduction of peanut and hen's eggs beyond 6 to 12 months may increase the risk of developing an allergy to these foods.

To read the full NHS post: 

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/baby/weaning-and-feeding/food-allergies-in-babies-and-young-children

Keep in mind:

Ups and downs: not every day is going to be perfect and it’s very normal that
some days your baby may seem to absolutely love their meal, whilst the next
day they don’t want to try a thing. Weaning isn’t necessarily a “linear” journey where every day they eat more and more. Whilst over time, you’ll likely see improvements, there will also be plenty of appetite changes and food refusal - it’s all part of the journey.

Rejected foods: there will be times when your baby totally refuses to try a
food and that’s ok! Not every day is going to be a success and it’s important to
respect your baby’s signs if they’re showing they’re not hungry or interested
in the food. Keep offering foods that may have been rejected before, as it can take
multiple exposures for a baby to become familiar with, and accept a particular
food!