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The 4 to 6-month mark is such an exciting time because you can start teaching your baby about solid food! But it can also be nerve-racking as you worry about choking and wonder if your baby will have any food allergies. Keep reading for information to help you introduce solid food to your
When to Start Solids
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that babies are exclusively breastfed for the first six month and that solids can be started at the 6-month mark. However, there are many babies that aren’t exclusively breastfed during this time. Babies receiving formula may still want to wait until the 6-month mark.
For my son, we ended up starting solids right at 4 months. At that point, we couldn’t keep him full with
Signs Baby is Ready to Try Solids
- Tongue reflex is no longer pushing food right back out
- Baby can sit up with minimal support
- Baby is interested in mealtime (i.e. trying to grab your food)
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Baby-Led Weaning
Baby-led weaning is where you wait to start solids right at 6-months by offering soft finger foods. This means that you don’t need to buy special baby food because your
First Foods
It used to be recommended to start with rice cereal followed by oatmeal. These foods have a low potential
Warning: Never put cereal into your
If you aren’t feeling the baby cereal, it’s now known that other foods can be appropriate. Avocados, bananas and sweet potatoes all make good options for first foods. Just follow the same principle and mix with breast milk or formula and slowly increase consistency as tolerated.
Introducing Common Allergens
It used to be believed that you need to wait until your baby was at least a year old to introduce things like peanuts, eggs, and wheat. However, if you don’t have any family history of food allergies, then it’s thought to be better to introduce these foods early. Just keep in mind appropriate consistency. Peanut butter can be too thick for baby for example.
Consistency
At
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Introducing New Food
It’s recommended that at first, you introduce one food no more often than every 3 days. This gives you time to make sure your baby doesn’t have a reaction. During this time, you want to feed the new food, but you can also offer foods that you have previously introduced.
If your baby doesn’t like something, keep trying it. It sometimes takes 10 or more times for a baby to decide he likes something. The various flavors take some getting used to when all you’ve ever had is milk. Some foods that I found work well include zucchini, sweet potatoes, peaches, pears, plums, avocado, and cauliflower.
Foods NOT to Try During the First Year
Nuts, popcorn, raw veggies, whole grapes, and hotdogs aren’t recommended because of choking risk. Grapes can be cut up and other berries like blueberries can be squished to reduce this risk.
Amount of Food
When you are used to looking at adult serving sizes, it can be hard to gauge what an appropriate amount of food for a baby is. At first, even the small containers of baby food will be too much for one sitting.
When feeding your baby, pay close attention to signs that your baby is full. These signs include, covering the mouth, pushing food away, turning away, getting distracted, and spitting food out. Signs that baby is still hungry include pulling the spoon to his mouth, focusing on you and the food, getting excited when you provide more food. When you are feeding your baby, you don’t want to force food in after he’s full. Once baby is able to feed himself, then it becomes easier to tell when he’s done.
Remember that most of your baby’s calories will still come from breast milk or formula for the first few months of solids.
For a helpful guide to daily servings, grab my baby meal planner here.
Other Tips
Baby Food Storage
Once you have fed baby directly from a container, you should discard any remaining food. Therefore, it’s wise to transfer food from its container into a bowl a little at a time. If you do that, unused baby food can be stored in the fridge for about 24 hours.
Utensils
Baby will not be able to pick up food until he develops the pincher grasp around 8 months. Until this point, you will need to feed your baby. Once he starts developing the pincher grasp, cheerios make a good option for practice.
Adult spoons will be too big, so make sure to have some silicon or plastic baby spoons on hand. I find that these spoons work well at first because they are tiny on the end, but they have long handles which
Another option is to use a fresh food feeder like this. It allows the
Keep Meal Time Fun
For the first few months, your baby will continue to get
Final Thoughts
Don’t stress too much about starting solid foods. Take your
For tips on making homemade baby food and ideas of things that make good first foods, check out this post.
Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Mom, wife, veterinary pharmacist, equestrian, ice cream lover and occasional hot mess
Lauren, I love this post! I wish I had been more aware of introducing allergens with my older children. This would have been so helpful for me!!
Trish ~ Habibi House
Thank you. Introducing foods can be so confusing if you let it. I wanted to simplify it as much as possible.
My first born had colic and it was brutal. We were happy when she finally went to solid food. Felt so bad for her plus the formula we had to use was insanely priced. We use her baby spoon for grated cheese to this day for the novelty of it. 🙂
Formula is very pricy, especially if you need a special variety! I was so glad when we hit the 12 month mark and could stop by formula totally.
I remember the fun times when my nieces and nephews started on solids. Lovely, fun and messy times. A messy face normally suggested they had enjoyed the new introduction.
If a messy face means it was enjoyed, then my son has always been a big fan of food!
Really good tips here! If I ever make a tiny human, I’ll definitely check back. The photos are so cure though haha.
Thanks I think my model is pretty cute 🙂
(writing notes quickly) I’m taking all this information down for when I have kids. Granted, my wife has been in childcare dealing with babies for like 20 years, so I feel like I have a Cheat Code, but I wanna learn this stuff too. I don’t know very much about taking care of babies at all, and I just assumed that every food would choke baby, so they just eat soft stuff until they’re like 2, which clearly isn’t the case. Do they go on solids before teething? How do you deal with that?
Taking care of babies as a first time parent is basically flying by the seat of your pants. As a new parent I had to use my best guess and/or google search everything! Hopefully with my blog posts I help other new parents find that info that I searched for.
I loved this post because it brought me back to the years when my kids were so tiny and sweet! (They are still sweet but, alas, not so tiny anymore.)
We loved introducing solids to the kids as we had so much fun finding out which foods they enjoyed and seeing their expressions with new tastes.
Great post!
I loved the new foods stage because of how much fun it was. My son is growing so fast that I am alraedy starting to miss the tiny stage, but he’s only going to get bigger if I keep feeding him (or so I’ve been told)
Some great tips.Passing it on to my niece who has just been blessed with a sweet daughter a month back.
Oh congrats to your niece! The time really does fly, and she will be starting solids in a blink of an eye.
Thanks for these tips. unfortunately I’m passed that stage, and I hope by the time I become a grandpa, there won’t be an app for feeding kids…Lol
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone comes up with an app for feeding kids. There’s an app for just about everything these days.
Great tips that I can imagine will be super helpful for parents who are starting to introduce foods to their baby. PS love the photos. Is there anything cuter than a baby covered in food?
I have a ton of photos of my baby covered in food because it was way more fun to take pictures than clean him up.
Great information! We’re planning to hopefully start a family this year, so this will be useful!
Good luck! Being a mom is absolutely wonderful!
My niece’s first food was cerelac. These are super useful tips for parents that would help them in starting solid food for their kids!
I had to google what Cerelac was because I had never heard of it before.
It’s definitely an interesting process to switch your first baby to solids!
It’s always so fun to see their reactions to the new foods!
Excellent information! Thanks for laying out the plan to solid foods. You’re right about following your baby’s cue, so true.
It’s a fun but scary milestone for parents, but hopefully this will help new moms navigate the waters a little more confidently.
We have four grandchildren ages three and under who visit often and spend days with us. This was a good reminder of what to feed them and when.
when you aren’t used to feeding little kids it can be hard to remember what they eat.
This is a great post. I was so nervous to start solids with my baby girl. especially when her Dr. told me to introduce peanut butter right at 6 months (she had been eating cereal for about a month and a half). I hope this post helps a lot of new parents out there!
Thanks for the read,
Brooke | Mother Me Crazy
Thanks! Peanut butter scares me a little because it’s thick and chunky. I’m more concerned about it from the choking standpoint compared to the allergy side. I ended up using the PB2 powder to mix into cereal.
I don’t have kids, and I still love reading your posts! I learn so much every time. I had no idea about paying attention to how they are swallowing formula as an indicator if they are ready for solid foods.
I’ve added that to the list of things I’ve learned since becoming a mom. There is so much that I had no idea about until I was in the thick of things.
I just started solids too! Both of my sons started close to 5 months…I was torn about it at first, but they both started showing…the signs…so I went for it! What a great post for new moms.
I’m glad we started solids at 4 months because it’s what was right for my son, but it’s definitely something parents just need to go with their instincts and decide what is best for them.
Wow it’s been so long, I’ve almosy forgot all the trails and turbulantion we went through doing this frame. Man I should miss it. Thank you for the flash back!
It’s easy to forget once you don’t have to carefully consider what they are eating for each meal.
Introducing your baby the first solid food is a very big and important milestone. I still remember the first time my first had her first scoop of solid food! A great post and very useful for all new mothers.
It was definitely a milestone I was very excited for. It’s so much fun seeing the reaction to new foods.
It’s always scary introducing new foods to your little ones. But the crazy faces they make when they try new foods may be the best thing in the world.
The crazy faces with new foods are awesome!
Great tips! Starting on solids is fun (and a bit daunting) at times. I love the guidance on how much food to give, as well as baby utensils. These are things that are often overlooked!
We often don’t think of questions like how much food to give until we are in the thick of it and don’t know the answer. I wanted to try and answer all the questions that came up as I was starting my son on solids.
these are some wonderful tips that i must share with my mom-to-be and new mom friends! thank you for sharing.
I’m sure your new mom friends will appreciate every little hack they can get to make momming just a little easier!
These are all great tips for starting solid food with your baby. It took a lot of trial and error when starting solid food with my daughter and there is so much information out there. My daughter actually preferred a more textured food so I would mix cooked quinoa into a vegetable or fruit puree and she was more likely to eat it. We did a mix of BLW and purees. There are definitely some things I did/didn’t do with my daughter when it came to trying solid foods so I feel better prepared the second time around, when that time comes. I am not rushing it though!
Mixing in quinoa is a great idea that I hadn’t thought of!
Great post Lauren!! We have had so much fun introducing new foods! We’re following a baby led weaning approach, but are flexible here and there. It’s been going great!
Baby led weaning seems like it would be less work than starting with purees; however, Paxton and I weren’t patient enough to wait for that point LOL.
Thankfully, switching to solids wasn’t as challenging as I once thought it was. I was so fearful of them choking on everything because my kids got their teeth a little later. We did baby led weaning and just worked out way through the feeding process with them.
I spent so much time the first couple of months stressing over exactly what foods and how much to feed my son and then eventually realized it didn’t have to be that hard.