When our son Isaiah was a baby, we paid a lot of attention to family dinner: we were careful never to have it. Isaiah ate his premasticated mush early; we ate our toothsome food late. We got to complete our sentences, if we still knew how.
It was because we almost never ate dinner with Isaiah that we decided, someday when he was not yet a year old, that we should eat down and eat together as a family. With impeccable new parent logic, we made Actual Dinner for the occasion. (Leg of lamb: I am not joking.) You know how this ends. At some point during the aborted dinner, I vaguely remember looking at Isaiah and thinking, But this is Special Time! Why are you ruining Special Time?
We went back to not having family dinner.
Isaiah is now four and some. His brother, Samuel, or Mila, is the baby who’s almost a year old. And our life is very different: because Isaiah now always eats with us, we eat early, which means that Mila eats with us too. He doesn’t eat premasticated mush. He eats whatever we eat. (It is never leg of lamb.) We don’t road-test each ingredient first. We don’t even cut it up, really.
This sounds like a disastrous plan. It works brilliantly. We have a solid fifteen minutes of family dinner, before Mila, in some preverbal pagan ritual, starts systemically slaughtering everything on his tray and disposing of the carcasses over the side.
Every baby is different, and aside from Mila’s blood-lust, we got lucky. But I have learned a few things about eating with small humans that I did not know when Isaiah was a baby, and I wish I had. They are:
1) Babies eat food.
This fact is curiously hidden in the literature, which always makes babies sound like very complicated consumers of food-like substances. There is talk of introducing new ingredients in stages, and the phasing-in of difficult tastes, and the super food must-haves with mega-antis and hyper-pros.
In response to the literature, I have devised a single rule for making baby food: at all costs, avoid making baby food. Feel free to write it down for handy reference.
My thinking is basically: Making food for everyone else is hard enough. As I have explained to Mila numerous times, just because he’s an infant doesn’t mean he gets to be infantilized.
The best argument for being Very Cautious and Complicated was always the allergy argument. So it helped that since Isaiah was a baby, the American Association of Pediatrics decided the no-nonsense advice they’d given parents about how to prevent allergies was—and this is a technical medical term—ass-backwards. The old advice, of course, was to postpone introducing potential allergens until later in infancy; the new advice is more or less the opposite. (This month the AAP published a new report about when parents were feeding their babies solid food—and the authors seemed shocked, shocked, that parents were not following the medical advice — waiting until after six months. I am sure the current advice is correct, just as the previous advice was also correct; I am also sure the AAP has forfeited the right to be shocked. The authors were very gently skewered by Perri Klass, a pediatrician herself, in the Times.)
As far as I can tell, the state of the science on allergies is: We’re still figuring it out! We’ll be right with you!
So Mila eats whatever we eat, except when we’re truly desperate and have dinner entirely composed of Isaiah’s leftover Halloween candy. I’m kidding, of course. That rarely happens.
2) Babies eat food the way it looks on your plate.
I was very attentive and semi-paranoid about what I fed Isaiah. For better or worse, I am neither with Mila. It helped that in between their babyhoods, I wrote a book on the history and science of infancy, Baby Meets World, and I learned that babies have survived a lot worse than not having their broccoli pureed. I am not suggesting we revive any of these ancient (and not so ancient) wrongheaded feeding practices. (Dried cow teats for bottles: probably not those either.) But babies are far more flexible and resilient than we think: they can handle a few chickpeas.
This was a major revelation. Cutting up food into neutrino-sized pieces is a hedge against everything else you will do wrong as a parent: at least, you think, at least I never gave you a whole grape. That’s how I felt about feeding Isaiah: I could control very little about the world, but I could control the size of the pear slices on his plate. And I would!
There was a problem, though: after months of feeding Isaiah specks of solid food, he was not especially skilled at eating food that was larger than speck-size. Back when he was about a year old, I still remember my amazement seeing another baby who put O’s in his mouth and then—wait for it—swallowed the O’s. It felt like a magic trick.
I am not the brightest bulb in the pencil case. But eventually I realized that Isaiah was bad at eating food with texture because we gave him so little of it. By the time Mila arrived, we’d seen a primer on baby-led weaning. It has a complicated name to hide the fact that it is extremely simple: It means you pay less attention to what you feed your baby. You let the baby eat big people food in big people sizes. Yes, he did gag occasionally: The first couple times we were apoplectic. Then we calmed down. He did fine.
I still occasionally puree food for Mila; he eats faster than way. But he mostly eats food he can pick up. And it seems emblematic of parenting today that I needed something that looked like a system—that looked like the new way of feeding babies—in order to give myself permission to do this.
I find this discussion fascinating! Like many of the posters, I was terrified to start solid foods “too early” with my first. Then, I met a mom who fed her one year old anything. And he really wanted the food, so he figured it out. When my son came along, we tried that, and he loved it. He eats everything we eat, and he’s upset if he thinks he doesn’t have the same food. Now, him eating with the family is never a clean experience, but the social aspect is absolutely worth it. Perhaps I’m more focused on that because I work outside the home and this is the only time the entire family is in one place at the same time each day, but it wouldn’t be the same meal without our messy 19 month old. I am hopeful that enjoying texture, spice and flavor early on will help him to avoid the picky phase that so many young kids (my oldest included) seem to go through.
Zelda, I completely agree that it seems odd that everything must be child led in North America – that is actually my point and what we emulate at home. I think that was Nicholas’ point as well: that perhaps we could back off making such a huge deal about feeding babies in a seperate ritual. Our child is not the centre of attention and we don’t focus the ritual around her, she is merely part of it. In my personal experience living abroad which I did for an extended time, kids were included and expected to participate but not dominate. My persusal of the rash of pro-French parenting books seems to suport this idea as well (for whatever they are worth).
My first solid meal as a baby was… beef. Pan seared, olive oil and garlic beef. My mom cut it into stripes so I could grab it with my hands. I was six months old, so I don’t remember any of that, but she says that I chew that stuff, sucked all the juices and left the dry fibres on the table.
My brother’s first meal was also beef, but he ate the entire stuff.
And then a whole banana.
And some breast milk for dessert.
I’m glad that this book has confirmed that babies *do* eat food! I was starting to wonder, as our 8-year still hasn’t yet got the hang of it 😉 Waiting for the day!!
xoxo PARIS BEE kids blog
Our son, now 11.5 months, has never had a puree. We followed the Baby Led Weaning philosophy, and he loves all kinds of foods (especially spicy stuff!). He tried jerk chicken and curried goat a month ago when we were on vacation and loved them.
I think the new AAP advice applies only to families who don’t have a history of food allergies. We’ll be waiting to introduce some of the major allergens, especially nuts, to our baby due in August since his older brother has egg and nut allergies.
@KKRvF: Thanks for sharing your own experiences, it’s a fascinating subject. As parents we tend to suffer from a case of selective memory loss, glossing over the bits we don’t want to remember. In my case, that involves the hours spent spoon feeding each child, pureeing vats of veg and decanting into individual servings, even cooking separate, easily digestible meals (until the age of 3, at least). As for children ‘magically’ learning the skills to participate in family meals, I truly don’t remember when or how this happened – over 17 years ago, in the case of my eldest! But then, for all those babies let loose at the communal table, at what point do they learn that it’s not OK to grab food with hands, to touch food on other diners’ plate, to sit quietly until the meal is over for everyone, not to crawl onto the table, upsetting water jug and dishes (I have seen this!)? I think that feeding our kids is about more than nutrition, it’s also an education. I’m sure others will argue differently, but in my view there are no educative benefits to be had in skipping a year or two, they all get there in the end.
I bring you great news from the future. My 27-year-old daughter emailed a link to this post thanking me and my husband for always sharing sit-down meals and real food with her and her little sister. It is one of the most long-lasting and beneficial activities and parent and child can share.
I’ m surprised to read this. We feed babies food and dinner from 4-5 months of age, at the table, during family dinners. I have a 5 months old baby who is eating a lot of different food, he is happy, growing at a normal speed and sleeping all night. He sat with us during dinner from the beginning, even when he just ate milk. Dinner is holy ground 🙂
Hanne M., Norway
Nothing beats a family dinner in my opinion. I love preparing dinner with my boys (15 months and 4.5 years and yes I let them both help in the kitchen) and then sitting down with them to enjoy it. The only thing that precludes my husband from joining in too on many ocassions is the fact he is home from work too late during the week. I cook single meals and we all eat the same thing. My boys started on purees (homemade) at 4-5 months but by six months were on textured solids and finger foods and eating pretty much whatever was on the menu (I cooked salt free). Right from the start they ate when we ate and they ate where we ate: at the table. There are no baby high chairs in this house, we have Tripp Trapps which allow them to sit up at the table just like us. The’ll try anything and everything, have their likes and dislikes but the dislikes are few and far between. We have taught them good behaviour and good manners from the off and I will happily have them sit with us when entertaining, when eating out, when visiting friends. Increasing the number of settings at the table with each new arrival was never something daunting for me, it just meant there were more of us to enjoy meal times together and that I might have a little more clean-up to do when meal time was over. In my view the kitchen is the heart of the home, and round the kitchen table is where the some of the best family memories are made.