Healthy Eating for Your Baby - Planning Baby's Menu and Schedule

About midway through your child's first year, you can begin introducing your baby to solid foods. I recommend you con­sult with your pediatrician on the best time to do this for your particular baby. Because of a baby's tongue-thrust reflex, an infant younger than four months will usually not be able to take solid food; she'll just push it out of her mouth with her tongue. But by five months, that reflex should be gone.

Once again, I'm speaking as a psychologist rather than a medical doctor, so from that perspective I want to stress that you should not let early feedings degenerate into power struggles. If your six-month-old doesn't seem to want solid food, there's no point in embarrassing yourself with all kinds of airplane antics to sneak the food into his mouth. Go back to breast-feeding or formula, and try again a day or two later.

Also, don't expect too much too soon. In other words, don't set yourself up for failure. Your baby has never eaten solid foods before. If you can take her in your lap, and she takes half a spoonful on the first try, then spits out the second, you've made progress. Stop there and try again later.

First-time parents have a tendency to be overly nervous and to try to make baby fit a certain regimented schedule. But remember this: As long as your baby is getting proper nutri­tion and growing at an acceptable level, it's not a "Life-and-death" issue whether they start taking solids at six months or seven months.

If you want meals to be enjoyable, why start an early habit of feeding wars?

I've been very pleased with the way my wife helped our kids in this area. She used the food processor to make her own baby foods, mashing up vegetables and other menu items to create in our children a taste for a variety of types of food. As teenagers, our kids actually fought over the broccoli. Now, you may not have the time, opportunity, or inclination to mash up food for your baby for every meal. But the point is this: Your kids will discover sugar soon enough. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and the Mars candy company will spend billions of advertising dollars to make sure of that. There's certainly no need to rush it. By cutting down on the sugar and feeding your child healthy foods, it's less likely that you'll face the food wars that so many parents want to discuss with me in the counsel­ing room. Kids get hungry, and they'll eat what's there if noth­ing else is available to them. The sooner they acquire a taste for healthy food, the less chance there will be for the toddler food wars that might erupt a year or two later.

If you've adopted an older baby or toddler, especially one from a different country, the child may already have some acquired likes and dislikes, or at least things that are familiar or not familiar. The best plan for broadening your child's horizon menu-wise may be to feed him the foods you know he likes, and then gradually, one at a time, introduce some bites of "new to his tastebuds" food in a fun, relaxed setting. Force-feeding your child will only spark the food wars you're trying to avoid.