Introduction to infant feeding and baby's first food. Step-by-step instructions

Children's nutrition behavior and human culture are based on education. A child cannot learn to eat by himself.

After a month of starting to introduce complementary foods on their own, many mothers find themselves in a situation where their expectations regarding the child's behavior differ from reality.

This guide will help parents navigate the journey from A to Z with confidence and trust.

Habits tend to develop. They do not appear instantly, especially in food. If by one's example, a healthy approach and adequate support lay the foundation before a year, three, or five years old, a person will take care of himself later in life even through the prism of Coca-Cola, chips, and teenage years. A guide to complementary foods introduction is a simple instruction for a 6-month-old infant's plate. You offer innovations from the adult diet step by step and with love, respecting the right to refuse. Later it will become clear that by breaking the child's "no" answer, you form a pattern of the impossibility of refusal in the future: junk food, alcohol, etc.

The child tends to concentrate and try. Food for new little people is not only a technical and mechanical act of filling the stomach but the knowledge, experience, and meditation. I want this, and I don't want that. Tasty, not tasty, warm, or bland. Juicy or crunchy. Puree or slice.

The guide is based on very comprehensive and short recommendations by the international standards of the WHO, La Leche League, and USDA Infant Feeding Guidelines and studied along and across recommendations on supplementary feeding from a dozen developed countries on all continents.

What may surprise you (prepare in advance) is that there is no unified standard. In hot maritime countries, vegetables with olive oil are recommended as the first complementary foods, and in northern European - meat, porridge, and vegetables. In American countries, almost the first such foods are legumes. Eating habits are shaped by history and adjusted by access to new knowledge.