Starting your baby on solid foods is a fun and exciting milestone, and one you should definitely have your camera ready for! But like everything in parenting, there is a lot of uncertainty about when and how to get started.
In today's episode, I'll be talking a little bit about how to recognize when your baby is ready to start eating solid food, and a whole lot about how to go about it.
Having struggled with my own son's finicky eating habits, I've learned from experience (as well as a few expert nutritionists) about the relationship that babies and toddlers form with food.
So today I have some great tips to help you start them off on the right foot, encourage them to try new, healthy foods, and eliminate the battles over when and what they eat.
As parents, we all strive to do the best we can when it comes to raising our kids. But actions taken with the best intentions can have negative effects, and we may not realize the impact they have until the damage is already done.
Today, I'm going to talk a bit about some of the more unhelpful behaviors I've observed in my time as a sleep consultant (as well as some of my own!) and talk a bit about why we're likely to engage in them, why they're not doing what they're intended to do, and what we can use in their place to be the best parents we can be.
I can't tell you how many times I've spoken with parents who were desperate to get their child sleeping through the night, but when it came to actually getting started, they felt like it "just wasn't the right time."
Don't get me wrong, they had good reasons for saying so. Baby was teething, baby was just getting over an illness, baby was about to switch to a big-kid bed, and so on.
The truth is, there are some situations where I think it's best to put off sleep training for a brief period, but waiting for the "perfect" moment is going to leave you and your little ones exhausted for a long time to come.
There's a commonly held belief among the devotees of attachment parenting that sleep training isn't compatible with their parenting style.
That's not surprising, since one of the founders of the attachment parenting movement, Dr. Bill Sears, amended the core principles of his system to include "Beware of baby trainers."
But having worked with parents who subscribe to this approach, I have found that there's plenty of room for compromise. You can stick to every fundamental rule of the attachment parenting model and still teach your baby the skills they need to sleep through the night.