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How to Make Baby's Mealtime Easier

Feeding baby and high chair safety

How to Make Baby's Mealtime Easier

From the beginning, try to offer your baby a degree of independence when feeding him. Letting your baby feed himself (or at least take part in feedings) not only gives him a degree of independence, it's also a great way to improve his hand-eye coordination and overall manual dexterity. The food that makes it all the way into your baby's mouth and then down to his stomach serves as a positive reward for your baby's efforts to coordinate hand, eye, and mouth.

Babyproofing

If you use a baby seat that hooks onto the top of a table, make sure to lock it securely in place before seating your baby in it. Though she may look somewhat precarious hanging in midair in this kind of seat, resist the temptation to put a chair under the seat to shorten any potential fall. By thrusting her powerful legs on the chair, your baby may pop the baby seat loose.

Of course, you can't just plop your baby's food down on the tray or table in front of him and expect him to feed himself. But while continuing to do the bulk of feeding, you can still offer your new eater his own spoon (in addition to the one with which you feed him), his own cup, and at least samples of his own food on the tray or table. That way, your baby can squeeze and squirt the food between his fingers and (who knows?) once in a while even bring some of it up to his mouth.

Of course, you should never force your baby to participate in feeding himself, but you probably won't need to convince him. If you give him foods he likes and the tools and the opportunities he needs, he'll be more than happy to help feed himself. Be sure to allow extra time at mealtimes, because it will take a while for him to learn how to feed himself. Try not to get impatient with him. If your baby is having trouble manipulating his spoon, for example, he's probably frustrated enough without adding your frustration into the mix, too.

Given enough opportunities and encouragement, your baby will probably be able to feed himself a lot by the eighth or ninth month, but you'll need to give him a little leeway. Your baby will use whatever means are necessary (a cup, a spoon, his hands, or a few licks directly off the tray) to get food into his mouth, and you should let him do it. Don't worry about your baby's atrocious table manners; etiquette lessons can come later. For now, just concentrate on making eating solid foods and drinking from a cup as enjoyable as possible.

Table for One

When your baby can sit up with support for a reasonable amount of time (say, 5 to 10 minutes), you will probably want to start feeding her in a high chair or a baby seat that hooks onto the top of the kitchen or dining-room table. For safety reasons, your baby's high chair should have a wide, stable base and come equipped with a safety belt (including a crotch strap to prevent her from sliding down under the tray). A wide-rimmed, removable tray will catch most major spills and be relatively easy to clean.

Q-tip

There's an immediate and very practical reason to give your baby her own spoon even though she doesn't know how to use it yet. If she's holding onto her own spoon, then she won't be reaching for yours as much, and you will be able to feed her with far fewer interruptions.

For safety's sake, make sure to lock the high chair in the open position before you sit your baby in it. Then place the high chair in the middle of the kitchen or dining room or with its back against a wall. Keep it a safe distance away from anything (a table, a counter, or a wall, for instance) that your baby might kick her feet against. With the power in her thrusting legs, she could easily propel herself backward with enough force to knock the high chair over. Finally, make sure to strap your baby in securely and supervise her at all times. (It will help if you set up in advance so that you'll have everything you might need at hand before you strap your baby in the high chair.)

Your baby will enjoy having her very own spoon, even if she uses it for everything but its intended purpose. Your baby may bang it, wave it, put it in her mouth (whether her mouth is full or empty), and bite it. Though she probably won't use it to feed herself for several months, she'll never discover how to use a spoon properly if you don't give her one.

Baby feeding himself and clean up

By around eight months, your baby will begin using her spoon to feed herself, though not very efficiently. At first, she'll just dip her spoon into some food and lick it off. But within a few weeks of this initial experiment, your baby will be dipping or scooping her spoon and then opening her mouth and putting the food in it, at least some of the time. Your baby may find it helpful if you fill one spoon with food and then trade it for the empty spoon in your baby's hand. This bit of help will greatly increase the efficiency with which she feeds herself.

Q-tip

Before giving your child a sipper cup at the dinner table (or high chair), you might want to first introduce it at bathtime. That way you won't have to worry about spills at all while she's getting used to drinking from it. At the table, try to indulge your baby's spills and messes without blaming her or groaning. It takes a while to master the skill of drinking from a cup, so she'll need all the patience and support you can muster.

When your baby does want to try to feed herself with a spoon, try to make it as easy as possible for her to succeed. The soupiness of jarred fruits and vegetables, for instance, make it very difficult for your baby to feed herself those foods. The puree will tend to run off the spoon and on to your baby's chin, chest, lap, or high chair. (To make jarred food easier to keep on the spoon and give your child a fighting chance to get the food in her mouth, mix a little baby cereal in with it.) Your baby will have much better luck if you offer her "sticky" foods such as oatmeal, mashed banana, mashed potatoes, and thicker homemade fruit or vegetable purees.

In addition to providing a special chair and her very own spoon, you might want to consider giving your infant her very own cup, too. Choose a plastic "sipper" cup, ideally with two handles, that has a weighted bottom and a secure lid on top. These last two features will make the cup "spillproof," at least in theory. (In actuality, your baby will probably find a way to spill almost any allegedly spillproof cup.) Sipper cups do provide a valuable transition between the breast or bottle and a regular cup. Most allow your baby to get the water, juice, or other liquid out of the cup and into her mouth through either sucking or drinking. (Your baby's talent at sucking also may make it easy to cultivate the skill of drinking with a straw at this early age.)

In introducing your baby to the art of drinking from a cup, start with very small amounts of water or diluted juice. Then, once you're sure she can handle drinking from a cup, you can fill the cup up more and more in the weeks to come. Let your baby control her drinking as much as she wants. If she shows no interest in or protests against drinking from a cup, then put it away and try again in two or three weeks. But if she does want to hold her cup, go ahead and let her.

You should sterilize the sipper top of your baby's training cup every day. A dishwasher generally uses hot enough water to sterilize the top. But if you don't have a dishwasher, be sure to allow the top to drip dry in a rack rather than rubbing it dry with a dishtowel. (Kitchen towels are like beach blankets for bacteria.)

Mess Hall

Q-tip

Although kitchen floors are generally easy to clean, you might find clean up even easier if you spread out a newspaper or a plastic sheet underneath your baby's high chair before feeding him. If you feed your baby in a carpeted dining room, a dropcloth of some kind is essential.

Remember, for your baby, feeding (especially during the first few months) is not merely a matter of absorbing nutrition-it's fun time. Expect your baby to make a mess by playing with his food, and you won't be disappointed. Food is for eating, yes. But food is also for smearing, painting, slapping, spilling, and generally wallowing in. Try not to get too upset no matter how messy things get. Just keep telling yourself that everything, your baby included, will wash off.

The more opportunities you allow your baby to take part in feeding himself, the messier things will get. But the clean up will be well worth it, because your baby will learn how to feed himself faster.

To cut down on some of the clean up, you'll also need a bib for your baby. Plastic bibs are easy to clean, but if your baby is still eating drippy, pureed baby foods, they do little more than protect his shirt by shifting the spills to his pants. Cloth bibs absorb more of the liquid foods, but they need constant laundering. Plastic bibs with a pocket at the bottom are sometimes too bulky, but they will protect your baby's shirt while catching most spills before they reach his pants. If your baby rebels against wearing a bib (as many infants do) and you want to avoid getting into a prolonged battle, forget the bib and take his shirt off before feeding him. Just make sure the kitchen (or dining room) is warm enough for him.