Starting solids in a way that's easy and enjoyable - for both you and your baby

This page belongs to collection of short articles and videos in plain language, called Little people + food. The Possums approach aims to make introducing solids and toddler foods a lot easier than you might hear!

Food gives your baby’s little body the good quality nutrition necessary for her growth. Lots of fresh or lightly cooked fruit and vegetables, even from infancy, is the best for the human gut and body. It's important not to feed your baby overly sweet, salty, or highly refined foods.

But food is not only for nutrition, food is about enjoyment! We want your baby to enjoy the foods that your family normally eats, from your own cultural background. We come together over food with people we care about, to enjoy the taste of interesting types of foods, to have fun, to share of our lives and our news.

This way, your baby will quickly learn that food is enjoyable, sociable, and no fuss!

Here are the best ways to help your baby love food, in a single simple page.

• Offer a wide range of tastes and textures without any particular pattern, just from your family’s usual diet. This is the best way to build your baby's immunity for (or ability to cope with) different foods. There is no need for graduated introduction of foods which are labelled as allergens, or for recording new foods your baby has tried. This just makes life more complicated than it needs to be.

• Let your baby be in control of her eating. Have lots of opportunities for taste and play with a whole range of tastes and textures, without pressure to eat. Experimentation with the feel, texture and taste of solids is a vital way your little one develops a positive relationship with food. One of the big mistakes we made as health professionals in the past was to make parents feel pressured to get food into their baby. Now we know that pressuring a baby to eat can set up stress and distress in your baby’s relationship with food long-term, which we definitely want to avoid.

The saying that ‘parents provide, child decides’ is the best approach to take. This means giving your baby choice.

• Be ready for mess! Try to allow mess a lot of the time, even if you don’t have the strength to face a clean-up every time. Making a mess is a normal part of your baby developing a relationship with food. Some days you might not have much energy for the clean-up and you’ll try to keep it contained. But overall, it’s best to set it up so that it’s not problem if your little one makes a big, delicious mess.

• Sometimes you might offer food mashed up or pureed on a spoon, although your baby might want to take over. The main thing is to make sure your baby doesn’t ever feel under pressure to take it.

• Other times you might give you baby a finger food suitable for holding.

• Always watch a little one who is learning to eat. Keep the baby sitting upright (propped in your lap or in the high chair). That doesn’t mean that your baby necessarily has to be able to sit up entirely on their own, before you start offering solids to try.

• Don't add salt to your baby's food, either when you are preparing or serving it. But you also don't need to eliminate all salt from everything you offer her, either. That just causes unnecessary worry and work, without protecting your baby, because your (otherwise healthy) baby's kidneys are more than capable of dealing with small amounts of salt.

• Keep offering a food even if baby doesn’t seem interested at first. Lots of offers over time allow your baby to experiment with a wide range of foods and to get used to them.

• You can find out about how to keep your baby's airways safe as you start solids, and the difference between gagging and choking, here.

Acknowledgements

I'm grateful to Professor Sophie Havighurst, Ros June, and Caroline Ma at Mindful, The University of Melbourne, for their feedback on the articles and videos in Little people + food (brief & simple). They helped me keep the language plain and the concepts as accessible as possible.

Selected references

Borowitz SM. First bites - why, when, and what solid foods to feed infants. Frontiers in Pediatrics. 2021;9:654171.