Doing BLW When Someone Else Helps Watch Your Baby

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And. so gauging the level of interest of the childcare provider is so important too because maybe you ve spent all this time learning about baby led weaning, but the idea of like letting a baby feed themselves soft, solid pieces of food could be totally foreign to your childcare provider. So, my suggestion is to provide information about resources including peer reviewed research articles, books, like whatever their level of interest is, like go with it. They want TikTok. I got videos on TikTok for you guys of babies feeding themselves If, you wanna be on YouTube if you wanna share podcast episodes, so many resources, but just start the conversation early. Hey there. I'm Katie Ferraro, registered dietitian, college nutrition professor and mom of seven specializing in baby led weaning Here on the Baby Led Weaning Made Easy podcast.

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I help you strip out all of the noise and nonsense about feeding, leaving you with the confidence and knowledge you need to give your baby a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. Well, hey guys, welcome back In. Today's episode we're talking about how to succeed at baby led weaning when someone else helps watch your baby I. know you guys listening tend to be the primary feeders or the primary caregivers in the sense that you are the one who for the first six months of life was either exclusively breastfeeding the baby or you were in charge of the bottle routine If you were pumping or doing a combination of infant formula or straight formula, whatever it was that was the first six months of life and now you're moving into the second six months of life where baby is starting to transition to solid foods.

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And maybe you've been thinking about having somebody else help you. Now, who could that person be? I know we all wish we had someone else to help us, but maybe you have a grandparent or grandparent in-law who's there helping you with the baby or your partner is slowly like, Hmm, I'd like to help feed. Let, they rarely say that you're like, Hey, I'd like for you to help me, help me this baby. Or maybe you're going back to work so you're considering daycare, or you have a nanny or a caregiver, whatever the case may be. There will come a time where you're gonna have to offload some of the feeding responsibilities to somebody else, but you want to maintain those self-feeding principles of baby-led weenie. How do you do that? That's what we're covering today. Now I like to start each of these mini baby led weaning training episodes with a BLW tip of the day.

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And my top tip for you, if you're considering having someone else help you, is please don't expect the other person, the caregiver, the not. You don't expect that person to introduce a new food to your baby, especially early on in feeding. It's so important that you are the one who's making the food and trialing the food, making sure your baby can tolerate it. If it's an allergenic food, making sure that there's no allergy, we don't expect the caregiver to introduce new foods. Okay? If you're following my five step feeding framework where we introduce five new foods per week to the baby, your baby's trying a lot of new foods, right? And you know that the benefits of trying all these foods during the flavor window is that your baby will liken, accept a wide variety of foods. But we're also concerned about minimizing choking risk.

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We need to be paying attention for any potential food allergies. And so as the person who's in charge, we're the ones who feed the baby. Now, don't get me wrong, the second that food moves from a new food category to the familiar food category, which happens pretty quickly when you're doing one new food a day, once you're confident, hope my baby can tolerate artichoke and hope my baby doesn't have an allergy to tree nuts, then you can move it into a situation where hopefully the caregiver can help you feed that food. But hang tight and be sure to listen till the end of this episode, I'm gonna be sharing a free feeding guide that kind of outlines all of the different talking points and prompts for succeeding with baby led weaning when someone else is helping you. The things I'm gonna go through in this episode, I've outlined it in a free download and feeding guide for you as well. So quick story. I remember for my own babies, when I started baby led weaning, I had struggled a lot with traditional spoon feeding of my oldest, and then I had a set of quadruplets.

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So my aunt came on full-time to help me with the quadruplets, like almost right when they came home from the nicu. And so I remember struggling a lot with spoon feeding and saying like, we're not doing that again. And when it came time for the quadruplets to start solid foods, it was like I wanna explore this thing called baby led weaning. I'm a dietician but I don't know how to do it, so I'm gonna figure it out. And I said to Tia Carmita, who helps us like Tia, do you wanna help? And she's like, yes, yes, yes. I wanna feed the babies. Let's get some rice cereal and here's the baby spoon. And I was like, oh no. Like I'm not force feeding my baby's in as a dietician. I of course knew that drawbacks, we don't feed white rice cereal to babies every day anymore, right? There's lots of better options, especially because of the risk for arsenic toxicity with the rice foods. But I wanted to explore this idea of the baby's feeding themselves. Let's start with avocado.

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I had seen people do that online. I wanted feed the babies these soft strips of avocado and she was like, Katie, I am not comfortable with these my babies. I was like, okay, they're technically my babies, but like we all love them so much, but like she didn't want them eating soft solid strips of avocado. She's like, I'm gonna smash it up on the spoon and feed it to them. So I had to kind of back up and say, whoa, whoa Tia, you know what? It might actually be better for the first few days if you let me try to figure out this whole baby led weaning thing and then when I'm comfortable with it, I'd love to loop you in. So second tip there is wait until you are comfortable with a few foods that your baby can eat before you invite anyone else in, right? We all have different levels of control and I am like a control freak to the nth degree except what it had for babies and definitely needed someone else to help me.

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She was helping me all the time, but I like could not handle the pressure in the feeding environment when there's someone else like, oh my gosh, she's choking. It's like, no, she's not choking. And so my next suggestion to you is just like you've taken the time to educate yourself about the difference between gagging and choking, and you now know that gagging is a natural and necessary part of learning how to eat. Start early with communication for the people or person who's helping you to help them become familiar. Hey, go follow baby led weaning team on Instagram. I show lots of videos there of how your babies can gag on food and recover it, or this is how we're gonna prepare the food cuz it's actually safer. We actually went and started a whole YouTube channel to show you guys like I love the podcast as much as everyone else, but like seeing really is believing with baby led weaning. So start this conversation early with your caregivers so that they can get familiarized to the idea of baby led weaning.

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Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

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I also recommend gauging their level of interest. I know with the baby's carmita or aunt was like, I don't know what baby led weaning is. We don't do this in Mexico. And. it was like, well actually, now that I've worship in baby led weaning exclusively for the last six years, there's lots of families in Mexico who do a baby-led approach, but that's neither here nor there. So back to starting the foods with the babies, I did it for the first few days until I was comfortable and then it was like, Hey, we have avocado down. I'm gonna keep moving with one new food a day with these babies. But I would say, Carmita, I have this avocado ready, like if after nap time you wanna try to feed them some food, they're really comfortable with it. And I would loop her in after I was comfortable with the baby's level of like being able to eat those foods as an aside with multiples. Like one of my quadruplets Henry, he did not participate in mealtime for about the first six weeks.

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He could sit up on his own. He just sat at the table. He never brought any foods to his mouth. He watched his sister and brothers eat, but it took him a little bit longer. And I remember Carmita being so worried about him and I was like, Carmelita, like he will get ready to eat on his own time. He certainly did. But if you have multiples, just know that it, they're not gonna do everything at the same pace. One will be better and faster at eating earlier than the other one and the other one will eventually catch up. So gauging the level of interest is important, talking about it, starting that conversation early. We also want to encourage the safety first approach, right? All childcare providers, anyone who's helping to feed or watch my baby in my own house least needs to be C P R certified. And so I always take an infant refresher CPR course every quarter due to the line of work that I'm in.

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But I would suggest you take a refresher infant CPR course. I have a course, an online course that I take that's about $35, but there's a $10 off affiliate discount code Katie 10. I'll link the course up in the description where you're listening to the podcast and on the show notes. But take that refresher online CPR course and have your childcare providers take it as well because choking is a very rare but real risk. But knowing CPR can save your baby's life. So we want to make sure that everyone has proficiency in cpr. So I mentioned the importance of you getting comfortable with baby led weaning. First, starting that conversation with your childcare provider early. You do the new foods with no expectations that the childcare provider would do the familiar foods. Once you get further down the road, I find like a lot of families, once they get past like the 50 food mark, their baby has moved into phase two of baby led weaning, which is when we start doing the combination foods, then usually the parents are like, heck yeah, somebody else helped me.

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I'm very comfortable with you maybe even trying some new foods. But of course you know your own level of comfort and I find that most parents really should not be passing off that responsibility very early in the feeding process. It comes a little bit later. Another thing with baby led weaning is you might have realized this, that seeing really is believing. You can talk about baby led weaning until you're blue in the face. I know this because I do it for a living. You guys are listening to episode 307 of the podcast. Like talking about it is one thing, but seeing it is a totally other thing. It's a huge part of why we started the baby led weaning YouTube channel so that you guys can really see, ooh, that's how what gagging looks like. And they recover on their own and they go back to eating, Ooh, that's how you prep the food. Ooh, I didn't know that the first few days the kid's just gonna look at the food that what I'm experiencing is is totally typical.

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So video is very powerful and I suggest that you kind of start your childcare provider like, Hey, watch some YouTube videos. We have a lot of them on the baby led weaning channel or some Instagram videos. We're also on TikTok if that's where you are learning about stuff. And sometimes we get pushback like, you know why you're on TikTok and I'm on TikTok. Because if parents are on TikTok learning about baby led weaning, I want them to be learning from a credentialed feeding professional, not an influencer or a blogger who really has no business teaching infant feeding. So another aside, just make sure you're getting your infant feeding advice from credentialed feeding professionals, not from bloggers and influencers who might have done it with one kid, right? At this point, we've helped tens of thousands of families give their babies a safe start to solid foods using baby led weaning. And we can do the same for your family.

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Hey, we're gonna take a quick break, but I'll be right back.

2 (10m 36s):

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So if you're going going to daycare, another thing to keep in mind is that requesting a meeting may be important. And I've done other daycare episodes here on the podcast and I think it is really important. Like you don't spring this on like your childcare provider like five minutes before pickup at daycare. You're like, Hey, we're gonna do this thing called baby led weaning and I'm just gonna like send some pork and the baby's gonna feed themselves like it doesn't work like that. But if you can request a meeting and set some time aside and then say, Hey, this is how I set my baby up in the highchair. This is how I put the suction mat out. These are the foods that I put in the bowl and my request to you is that nobody puts anything in my baby's mouth except my baby. And I think that's the most important messaging. I actually share some ideas about messaging in the free feeding guide that I'm gonna give to you guys in this episode.

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If you tap the link, like right where you're listening to the podcast in the description of this episode or on the show notes, you can download this free feeding guide about how to be a baby led weaning Advocate at daycare. We have some sample language that you can use just in case I like sample scripts For one, like just tell me what to say because sometimes having these conversations can be challenging and sometimes daycare will say, oh, we don't do baby led weaning. But what they're really saying is, we've never seen anyone do baby led weaning successfully. So you need to be the Advocate for baby led weaning by showing them how your baby can safely eat. Because we can't have our babies be learning to feed themselves at home, but have somebody force feeding them by spoon at daycare. That's not consistent with the baby-led approach, but there's lots of ways you can make baby led weaning work at daycare.

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I've got them all linked up for you in that free feeding guide. Again, that's where you're listening to the podcast or on the show notes at BLW podcast.com/ 3 0 7. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you are exploring the idea of having somebody else help you, if you have techniques that have worked for you, if you're struggling with things with childcare providers and doing baby led weaning, lead me a comment in any of our YouTube videos I read and respond to every single comment. Also, while you're there, if you don't mind, hit subscribe. Growth on YouTube is painfully slow. We're spending a ton of time making new videos for you guys every week. I would love to hear your reaction to them. Love to answer any questions in comments. We're on YouTube at Baby led, weaning that free feeding guide about How, To, Be, An, Advocate for Baby led weaning at daycare.

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Lots of good tips in there, even if your baby doesn't go to daycare, if you have a nanny or you need some help bringing your partner on board or a grandparent, lots of good tips in that free feeding guide. I hope you guys like it. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to our partners at AirWave Media. If you'd like podcasts that feature food and science and using your brain, check out some of the podcasts from Airway Media. Check us out online at BLW podcast.com. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.