Can I follow baby led weaning methods and spoon feeding when needed? Will this just confuse my child?

In baby led weaning (blw) babies are supposed to pick up their own food, eat at their own pace and stop when they're full. Food is given in bite size pieces somewhat the size of your pinky finger and baby eats, biting off chunks and chewing (or gumming) before swallowing. In traditional weaning, food is pureed and fed to baby. As time passes, baby learns to eat mashed food and then with little chunks working their way up. Hence baby swallows first before learning to chew. Due to these reasons, it's generally not advisable to do traditional and blw concurrently as baby may forget to bite (or gum) during blw and swallow instead which can be dangerous. Hence the combination method has to be done with extreme caution and surveillance. Personal experience: it can be done. My mum feeds baby puree because it is her chance to bond and play with her while I do blw, but not all the time, as I sometimes run out of ideas. So far baby is able to adapt well. I think you just have to try and see if it works for you. Just need to constantly remind baby to chew when blw by making the chewing action for her to imitate. Have fun!

Baby-led weaning is what it is - baby led. Once spoon feeding is introduced, then it is known as the traditional weaning method. When the baby first starts self-feeding (typically at around 6 months old), very little food is ingested as it's more for them to explore the tastes and textures of food. That's why it should also be complemented with breast milk. If you want to do a mix of both, then try a variety of finger foods which your child can pick up easily and have puree on standby. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby-led_weaning

I have a friend who did a mix of baby-led weaning and also spoon feeding. This is because their family eats out rather frequently and she wanted to be able to feed her baby while outside to minimize the mess. Her baby had no issue having a mix of both methods. An added advantage (she feels) is that she could also feed purees, cereal and porridge easily to her baby. When her baby was older, she would spoon these and encourage her baby to feed himself.

this wont necessarily confuse your lo but if u truly want to go for blw i would suggest dont spoon feed her. obviously you can do both as well. my lo loves it when i spoon feed her. she takes the spoon and tries eating herself as well

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It is okay to partially doing spoon feeding during weaning. However, if you want to ensure the success of BLW, make sure most of the time baby feed herself either using hands or spoon by her own.

thanks