What Happens When You Let Babies Feed Themselves?

I remember the first time my daughter discovered her hand. The look of amazement on her face was priceless. It wasn’t long before she was putting that discovery to use, trying to put everything she could find into her mouth.
                                                   

Babies want to feed themselves. It sometimes feels as if parents spend more time trying to stop them than encouraging them. Over the last few years, however, some people have begun to ask if we are doing the right thing.

Baby-led weaning is an approach to feeding that encourages infants to take control of their eating. It’s based on the premise that infants might be better self-regulators of their food consumption.

Those weaned in a baby-led approach seemed to be more responsive to being sated and were less likely to be overweight. A case-control study from 2012 also argued that baby-led weaning was associated with a lower body mass index (B.M.I). Such trials cannot establish causality, however, and may be confounded in unmeasured ways.

Both got standard midwifery and child care. But one group received eight more contacts, from pregnancy to the newborn’s ninth month. Five of these were with a lactation consultant, who encouraged the mothers to prolong breast-feeding and delay the introduction of solid foods until 6 months of age. The three other contacts were with research staffers who encouraged parents to read hunger and fullness cues from their infants and provide their babies (starting at 6 months) with foods that were high in energy and iron —  easy to grab but hard to choke on.

The researchers were thorough. They frequently tested parents’ adherence to the baby-led approach throughout the second half of the first year of life, with outcomes collected by researchers who did not know which group participants had been assigned to. Before randomization, most of the mothers were planning to spoon-feed their babies, so this was a new way of thinking.