Feeding your infant grown-up foods

Feeding your infant grown-up foods

As Maggie’s progressed in age, we’ve gotten to the point at 10 weeks where she stares at us like we’re some sort of gods if we hold anything with peanut butter on it anywhere near her presence.

She’s started serious attempts at keeping her head up, as though knowing that a baby who can hold its head up gets peanut butter and chocolate, and so the time came for us to do some research into the whole thing as it’s one of the areas I haven’t before.

As I began to read the internets, I once again weep for humanity as no matter what you decide to do it appears there are idiots out there who want to make you feel like a horrible person no matter what you do. Oh yes, besides that you’ll be harming the life of your child for vague voodoo reasons that are never fully explained.

Last year the American Association of Pediatrics issued a statement saying that four months was too young to let you infant eat the fuds, and now you’re a horrible parent if you feed them anything before six months old.

Breaking down a Slate piece on it from March 2013, it appears that the AAP decided that breast milk was good mmm’kay? and that they would do whatever was in their power to make sure that infants got it for as long as possible. To do this many boogymen and pseudoscience were crafted and hand-picked.

The whole AAP statement could have been broken down to the following checklist:

• We believe in feeding your child breastmilk or formula till at least six months old although we have nothing solid scientifically past about four months.
• An infant can choke if it can’t control its own head and neck.

But they didn’t. Past that, anything else is conjecture and bad science.

So, it looks like feed the kid breastmilk or formula through when they start eating solids should have been a reasonable recommendation that the American Association of Pediatrics could have made, but for some reason they took the nuclear option and went with NO FUDS 4 U KID!

There also were bad science studies about obesity and eczema thrown into the recommendations.

It’s pretty worrisome when the people charged with setting policy to take care of your kiddo are going to push their development back and substantially risk giving the child celiac disease (7+ months of breastmilk-only).

As you’re waking for the 5th time for the night to feel your starving five-month-old more formula, remember there’s some potential boogeymen that might attack.

What’s a bit more bothering is that rather than back up the recommendations they’re giving, the AAP decided to do a study on why many moms are not following the recommendations.

Even doing a search on the American Association of Pediatrics website the first link for solid foods lists the following for switching to solids:

• Can hold head up
• Opens mouth when food comes near
• Ability to swallow off of a spoon
• Doubled birthweight (typically about 4 months)

I kid you not, the first item in the search on the AAP website for “solid foods” says about 4 months… not 6 months. And it was published after their change to the 6-month recommendation.

sigh….

Here’s a pretty good resource for navigating all of this I discovered in 2018.