Your Baby's Needs

Your baby will always take enough food to satisfy her needs. If she doesn't want to eat, then she doesn't need to. This means that there will be days when she will eat hardly anything, but these will be followed by periods of eating a lot.

To eat a balanced diet, your baby should take in foods from all the different food groups in the correct proportions. This doesn't have to be on a daily basis, though, so when you are considering whether she is eating well, you need to think in the long term: look at what she has eaten in the last week, not just today. Viewed like this, a binge of eating nothing but bread for two days is nothing to worry about, as your baby will probably take in enough fruit and vegetables during the week to balance this out. What is important is that she should be given a wide variety of foods to choose from: she can't eat the foods she requires if they are not made available to her.

Your baby will gradually come to eat many of the same foods as you, prepared in a form that she can manage. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that her needs are the same as yours or that a diet that is recommended as healthy for you will be good for her, You may aim to reduce your fat intake by using low-fat versions of dairy products, for example, but you should give your child whole milk until she is two years old; after that you can introduce low-fat milk if you wish. The benefits to health of limiting sugar intake, though, apply just as much to babies as to adults. You should never add any salt to your baby's food.

A Flexible Attitude

The sample menus shown above are intended as a guide to your baby's main meals. Remember, a baby's stomach can't hold very such, and she will need to eat more often than an adult, so don't Insist she finish her meals, and be prepared to give snacks in between times. Of course you should encourage your baby to have regular feeding times, but if you try to make her eat only at mealtimes, they'll become battlefields and she may end up not getting the food she needs when she needs it. If she shows that she's had enough, don't try to make her eat more.

Of course it is frustrating if you have spent a lot of time preparing a meal and your baby refuses it, or it ends up on the floor. The answer is to make feeding times as easy on yourself as possible: don't spend a lot of time preparing complicated dishes, and take precautions to protect the walls and the floor from thrown food.