Transitioning baby to solid food

When, What, and How to Introduce Solid Foods | Nutrition

For more information about how to know if your baby is ready to starting eating foods, what first foods to offer, and what to expect, watch these videos from 1,000 Days.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend children be introduced to foods other than breast milk or infant formula when they are about 6 months old. Introducing foods before 4 months old is not recommended. Every child is different. How do you know if your child is ready for foods other than breast milk or infant formula? You can look for these signs that your child is developmentally ready.

Your child:

Sits up alone or with support.
Is able to control head and neck.
Opens the mouth when food is offered.
Swallows food rather than pushes it back out onto the chin.
Brings objects to the mouth.
Tries to grasp small objects, such as toys or food.
Transfers food from the front to the back of the tongue to swallow.

What Foods Should I Introduce to My Child First?

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that for most children, you do not need to give foods in a certain order. Your child can begin eating solid foods at about 6 months old. By the time he or she is 7 or 8 months old, your child can eat a variety of foods from different food groups. These foods include infant cereals, meat or other proteins, fruits, vegetables, grains, yogurts and cheeses, and more.

If your child is eating infant cereals, it is important to offer a variety of fortifiedalert icon infant cereals such as oat, barley, and multi-grain instead of only rice cereal. Only providing infant rice cereal is not recommended by the Food and Drug Administration because there is a risk for children to be exposed to arsenic. Visit the U.S. Food & Drug Administrationexternal icon to learn more.

How Should I Introduce My Child to Foods?

Your child needs certain vitamins and minerals to grow healthy and strong.

Now that your child is starting to eat food, be sure to choose foods that give your child all the vitamins and minerals they need.

Click here to learn more about some of these vitamins & minerals.

Let your child try one single-ingredient food at a time at first. This helps you see if your child has any problems with that food, such as food allergies. Wait 3 to 5 days between each new food. Before you know it, your child will be on his or her way to eating and enjoying lots of new foods.

Introduce potentially allergenic foods when other foods are introduced.

Potentially allergenic foods include cow’s milk products, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy, and sesame. Drinking cow’s milk or fortified soy beverages is not recommended until your child is older than 12 months, but other cow’s milk products, such as yogurt, can be introduced before 12 months. If your child has severe eczema and/or egg allergy, talk with your child’s doctor or nurse about when and how to safely introduce foods with peanuts.

How Should I Prepare Food for My Child to Eat?

At first, it’s easier for your child to eat foods that are mashed, pureed, or strained and very smooth in texture. It can take time for your child to adjust to new food textures. Your child might cough, gag, or spit up. As your baby’s oral skills develop, thicker and lumpier foods can be introduced.

Some foods are potential choking hazards, so it is important to feed your child foods that are the right texture for his or her development. To help prevent choking, prepare foods that can be easily dissolved with saliva and do not require chewing. Feed small portions and encourage your baby to eat slowly. Always watch your child while he or she is eating.

Here are some tips for preparing foods:

Mix cereals and mashed cooked grains with breast milk, formula, or water to make it smooth and easy for your baby to swallow.
Mash or puree vegetables, fruits and other foods until they are smooth.
Hard fruits and vegetables, like apples and carrots, usually need to be cooked so they can be easily mashed or pureed.
Cook food until it is soft enough to easily mash with a fork.
Remove all fat, skin, and bones from poultry, meat, and fish, before cooking.
Remove seeds and hard pits from fruit, and then cut the fruit into small pieces.
Cut soft food into small pieces or thin slices.
Cut cylindrical foods like hot dogs, sausage and string cheese into short thin strips instead of round pieces that could get stuck in the airway.
Cut small spherical foods like grapes, cherries, berries and tomatoes into small pieces.
Cook and finely grind or mash whole-grain kernels of wheat, barley, rice, and other grains.

Learn more about potential choking hazards and how to prevent your child from choking.

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When and How To Transition to Solids

With a better understanding of your baby’s eating habits and nutritional needs, you’ll feel more comfortable when it’s time for your little one to start solids. There are four key areas to remember – signs of readiness, quality over quantity, self-weaning, and making the first bites appealing, nutritious, and fun.

Signs of Readiness Checklist

When it comes to solids, think less about the calendar and more about your baby. Starting at four months of age, the bellies of healthy, full-term babies are ready to handle solids, but it’s completely normal if your baby isn’t ready yet. There is no proven disadvantage to waiting a few extra weeks as long as solids are introduced by six months. Pushing your baby to start solids when they aren’t ready can actually cause more harm than good.

The signs your baby is ready include:

A diminished tongue-thrust reflex – babies are born with the instinctive need to push everything out of their mouth with their tongues. If this reflex is still present, it will be difficult for your baby to swallow food.
Sitting up with support
Holding their heads up

They show interest in foods by doing at least one of the following:

Reach for food
Track food from your plate to your mouth
Lick their lips when you’re eating
Open their mouth for food
Try to eat your food

If your baby shows all four signs, she’s ready to try solids! If she only shows one to three signs, she’s close, but not quite there. Check your baby’s progress each week, noting when they show a new sign of readiness.

Quality over Quantity

The transition to solids is a time to focus on the quality of experiences your baby has and not the quantity of solids they’re eating. As your baby tries solids he’ll strengthen his oral motor muscles and coordination, practice swallowing, and eventually chewing. He’ll also learn eating is a social experience and food is pleasurable.

When choosing food for your baby, quality is what matters. Not all baby food is created equal, and the way the food is prepared and heated, and what it’s mixed with affect just how much nutrition your little one will get. That’s why I recommend using a combination of homemade baby food and commercial baby food, from a brand you trust. It’s easy to find jars and pouches in the baby food aisle that are diluted with water and broth, and overly sweetened with too much fruit, even when there is no fruit listed on the front of the label. Look to purchase baby foods that are made of the ingredients that are listed on the front of the label. For example, Beech-Nut Naturals(R) carrots should only have carrots on the ingredient list.

Fresh, high-quality baby foods have more vibrant tastes and colors made to excite your baby’s senses. Say goodbye to the bland and dull, and say hello to bold and bright. So, when comparing the price of store-bought baby food, compare the quality and nutrition – not the amount you’re getting for the price.

Weaning to Solids

When first trying solids, you should not immediately wean your baby off of milk or formula. Babies need practice eating, and until their skills are more developed, they can’t consume enough nutrients from solid foods.

Babies have an amazing ability to wean themselves, a process called self-weaning. This starts around six months of age when their bellies have more room. You’ll notice they tolerate larger volumes of milk at each single feeding, and reduce their total number of feedings as they eat more solids.

The Very First Bites

Begin with single foods. If your baby doesn’t tolerate a food, you need to pinpoint the exact ingredient. Once your baby has tried two separate foods successfully, feel free to blend them together at later meals.
Start with smooth puree that has a consistent texture when spooned from the jar. I recommend beginning with stage 1 jars from Beech-Nut’s Organics or Naturals lines or making it yourself.
Use a small baby spoon that is rubber coated or made of BPA-free plastic.
Give iron-containing foods, such as iron-fortified baby cereals, as one of the first few bites to babies who drink breast milk and do not take any iron supplements. Unlike breast milk, formula contains iron, so if your baby drinks formula, you do not need to offer iron-rich foods.
Offer a variety of flavors. Exclusively offering fruits will not expose your baby’s taste buds to other nutritious foods, like veggies and proteins.
Think vibrant and varied colors to excite your baby’s senses.
Offer one solid meal a day for the first few weeks. Remember, a meal at his age is just a few small bites.
Completely pureed soft raw fruits, like avocados and bananas, are safe. Harder fruits and veggies need to be cooked.
Practice spoon-feeding. Avoid putting food in your baby’s bottle or exclusively feeding from pouches.
Avoid the following during the first year:
- Choking hazards (hard nuts, small seeds, pits, hard, dry meat, whole grapes, dried fruit, hot dogs, tough skins, sticky foods, popcorn)
- Honey
- Unpasteurized dairy
- Juice
- Foods with added sugar

Consult your pediatrician for recommendations specific to your baby’s diet.

From mashed potatoes to pieces: when to switch your baby to solid food liquid food - mother's milk. Congenital reflexes are responsible for this process: sucking and swallowing. By the time they are applied to the breast, they are already quite well developed.

Up to 4-6 months the child can only eat liquid homogeneous food. If a denser lump of food gets into the mouth, the gag reflex will work.
From 4 to 6 months , the baby starts chewing. Parents may notice that the baby no longer sucks the toy that has fallen into the mouth, but tries to chew. Gradually, the work of the chewing muscles is consistent with the swallowing reflex, the baby shows interest in the food that he sees on the table with his parents. At this age, the protective reflex of pushing food thicker than breast milk with the tongue also fades away. This is a signal that the time has come to introduce the child to liquid homogenized (homogeneous) mashed potatoes and cereals, which resemble thick sour cream in consistency.
From 6 to 9 months, when many children have their first teeth, it is necessary to switch to a thicker food - puree (grind particle size 1.5 mm). But the dishes should still be without lumps. If they are caught, the baby will push them out of the mouth.
After 9 months the baby tries to chew everything that gets into his mouth. This suggests that it is time to complicate the structure of food and switch to coarsely ground purees (particle size 3 mm). Apples can already be grated on a coarse grater or just finely chopped. To encourage chewing, also offer the crumbs a piece of bread or baby biscuits.
After 12 months, when there are already 8 teeth in the mouth, boiled vegetables can be kneaded with a fork. As the chewing reflex continues to develop, it's time to teach your child to bite off food in small pieces. For this, the crumbs are given children's meatballs, fruit slices, a piece of bread, simple bagels.

The timing of the acquaintance of the crumbs with thicker food, of course, is approximate. But if you are too late or hurry with its introduction, problems may arise.

Haste can cause regurgitation, vomiting, and fear of eating food. If you decide to postpone a meeting with a thicker or solid food for a long time, then there may be a lag in the development of the digestive system and the chewing apparatus. It will be more difficult for a child to learn to bite and chew food. For this reason, it is necessary to carefully study the labels on baby food packages. Regardless of the recommendations of the manufacturer, remember that acquaintance with complementary foods cannot occur before 4-5 months.

Photo: Sam Edwards/Getty Images/OJO Images RF

When to start?

This should be determined by a doctor observing the baby's health, because each child has his own individual developmental characteristics and may not fit into the general scheme.

More useful materials about children's nutrition and development - in our channel on Yandex. Zen.

Lyubov Prishlaya

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5 easy ways to transfer a child to an adult table: from puree to pieces

teach your baby to chew: read about this and much more in our material.

Most often, by the age when grown-up babies have already learned to sit on their own, they show interest in the parent's table. Sometimes, with great zeal, they strive to try everything that is on the plate of their parents or brothers and sisters. And if they managed to get a trophy in the form of adult food, they not only try it “by the tooth”, but they can also smear it on the table or throw it on the floor.

And now there comes a moment when every parent dreamily thinks that soon there will be no need to prepare a “special menu” for the youngest member of the family and everyone will finally eat the same thing. But when does this time come?

When is the right time?

Experts agree that there are no clear boundaries, because every baby develops at its own pace. Coordinating the work of all the muscles of the oral cavity and chewing hard pieces can be even more difficult for babies. At the first stage of acquaintance with complementary foods, it is better to use homogenized purees, then - products with a puree-like consistency, and later - with pieces. Often at 8-9 months, babies try to chew on everything that gets into their mouths, and they usually already have several teeth, all of which suggests that the structure of food can be complicated. Let's see how.

5 easy ways to transition your child to adult meals

1. Take it slow and encourage interest

Starting with mashed potatoes, slowly but steadily add thicker foods to your diet. At the age of 6 months (it all depends on the pace of development of your baby and his physiological characteristics, for example, on the number of teeth), you can safely treat children to special children's cookies.

It will also be useful to observe the food interest of the baby - to notice that he himself is drawn to some adult food.

Be sure to tell us about the product's taste, texture, color.

Photo: shutterstock / Katrina Era

2. Create a special atmosphere at the table

It is very important for kids to follow a routine - eat at the same time, do it in your own place and preferably with your own children's appliances from your dishes, and, of course, in your chair. This disciplines, allows the gastrointestinal tract to work by the hour.

Baby chairs are ideal for feeding your baby. First of all, it is safe, but do not forget that the child must always be fastened. Use your own example to show how to use cutlery, because kids repeat everything after adults.

Make family breakfasts, lunches or dinners (and conversations) a special time. Time at the table is the time of communication, let it be a good tradition and remain in the memory of the child.

3. Choose special foods to transition to an adult diet

During the transition to an adult diet, unfamiliar food may seem tasteless, the child may think that you are giving him something inedible. One of the best transition options would be a special combined puree, for example, the FrutoNyanya line with pieces of meat and vegetables, which will introduce the baby to a new consistency and help stimulate chewing skills due to the pieces of vegetables and crushed grains contained there. In addition, each jar of this line contains 12% of the physiological needs of the baby (aged 9months) in iron.

Photo: Shutterstock / Elena Stepanova

4. Cook meals that are suitable for the whole family

Cooking for the whole family is a great idea. The main rule: your diet should be suitable for the child, which means a minimum of salt and spices. Introduce baby vegetable "soups", boiled or steamed vegetables into the child's diet. You can give your child to try different foods with pieces. And if he doesn't like it, offer again in a couple of weeks. It is important here not to miss the moment, but also not to rush: if you start introducing thicker and solid foods into your baby’s diet too early, this can lead to eating disorders and other problems.

5. Avoid watching cartoons and using gadgets while eating

It is important to be patient and not distract your child with cartoons and gadgets. So he will be able to feel the taste of food and learn to enjoy the process of eating - both in the present and in the future. Of course, turning on the cartoon and quickly feeding the child is very convenient, but when the baby is fascinated by what is happening on the screen, his brain analyzes only the cartoon and does not think about the taste of food and satiety at all.