Baby-led weaning
Mandy Sacher
Mandy Sacher
At around 6 months of age, the iron stores that your baby was born with will drastically reduce. This is why it is important to start your baby on solids around this time – if not beforehand. If you are introducing your baby to solid food through baby-led weaning, try not to limit their choices to “appropriate finger foods”. There are many other ways that you can offer foods, where your baby will be able to learn how to self-feed. For example, you can offer porridge with some compote and make it thicker, offer bolognese over pasta shells so they can pick up and explore the shells covered in the nutritious sauce.
Remember that enjoying food is a sensory (and messy) experience.
Depending on your little one’s age or stage in their solid food journey, it can be a good idea to offer the same foods that they are experiencing for themselves (via baby-led weaning) in a mashed texture… they can use food as a dipper (e.g cracker dipped in mash or with a spoon) – if you are concerned that they might not be getting their required nutritional intake.
It is also important that you are offering your baby the right amount of food to milk feed ratio. You can check your little one’s developmental needs based on their age in our Daily Rhythms.
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Mandy Sacher
Follow +Child nutrition expert and mother of two, Mandy Sacher, is a Paediatric Nutritionist and SOS Feeding Consultant. Her private practice focuses on prenatal and childhood nutrition, helping parents and mums-to-be feed their children healthy, nourishing foods right from the start. Mandy’s philosophy is simple: train children’s taste buds to enjoy nourishing, nutritionally beneficial foods early as possible to ensure optimal development and establishment of lifelong healthy eating behaviours. After the birth of her first child in 2010, Mandy became increasingly aware of the lack of nutritionally sound information available to first-time parents. She was alarmed at the amount of baby and toddler foods marketed as ‘healthy’ when the sugar, salt and preservative contents were overly high. Mandy realised the journey to junk food can begin with the squeezie yoghurts we are fed or the teething rusks given to us. Mandy’s career in children’s health spans more than a decade – in 2006, she, along with other paediatric experts, founded the MEND Programme, an independent, not-for-profit organisation established to research and prevent obesity in children. Mandy and her colleagues at MEND developed one of the world’s only proven weight-loss treatments for obese children, now based on ten years of research and clinical trials. For the past five years Mandy has consulted to daycares on implementing more nutritious whole food menu plans and also privately to parents with children of all ages. Wholesome Child’s nutritional workshops are held at preschools, mother’s groups, non-profit organisations and medical practices.