For many years pediatricians and nurses have explained the topic of complementary feeding in a very imperative way, a "must" instead of a "can", and mothers have thought that after six months the children had to eat, yes or yes, what they were told.
If they said that after six months the vegetable, fruit, meat, cereals, etc. were introduced, the parents insisted with the spoon for their babies to eat it, and also for them to eat everything, " that the pediatrician has told me that he has to eat 320 ml of porridge. "
Thus, children have spent decades watching spoons flying as if they were airplanes, television drawings so that opening the mouth was an almost unconscious thing and even receiving a pacifier behind the spoon as a stopper: spoon-pacifier-swallow; spoon-pacifier-swallows-breathes; spoon-pacifier-swallow; spoon-pacifier-swallow-breathe ... all methods aimed at forcing children to eat what adults thought they had to eat. But, this is a mistake: why babies should not be forced to eat: neither the plane nor the pacifier or cheat with something else.
What is not complementary food
Well, that. Complementary feeding is not to start giving children the food of the elderly because if they do not receive it, they will begin to suffer terrible deficiencies. It is not giving them food with vitamins because they need them. It is not to give them vegetables, fruit and meat because they already need to eat every day, like this, from one day to the next. Nor is it to make him eat the amount that the pediatrician says he has to eat because he says he needs it.
What is complementary feeding?
Well, what your own name indicates: a complement. A complement is not a dress. A complement is a bag. Can you go outside without a dress? Yes, being able to do it, but the same thing comes the police and it catches your attention. Can you go outside without a bag? Yes, you can, the police will not come to tell you that you left your bag at home, although it is true that it is more comfortable to wear to put inside the wallet, the mobile and other tools more or less necessary.
Well, complementary food is all that food that has as its objective accompany the main feeding of babies, which is breast milk (or failing that artificial milk). This is so until the year of life, more or less, at which time the bag is more important because it happens to be the suitcase with which you will go on vacation with the clothes inside.
In other words: yes, the baby begins to need food because only with milk it cannot be until the year of life, but it does not need it overnight, but it can be added progressively. Nor do you need a certain standard amount for all babies in the "300 ml porridge" plan, because each baby knows how much it needs.
A study carried out in the year 2000 by Butte counted the calories that babies needed between 6 and 24 months. As a curious fact, if we look at the maximum energy that a six-month-old male baby, 779 kcal / day, and the minimum daily amount that a 2-year-old male boy, 729 kcal / day, may need, we see that a six month old child may need more food than a 2 year old.
Imagine the hypothetical situation in which a 2-year-old boy and his 6-month-old cousin sit together to eat and that both eat practically the same amount of food. Most likely, the 2-year-old receives a sermon because "you don't eat anything" and is even compared to your cousin: "Come, eat. Look at your cousin. He is only six months old and eats the same as you. "
Children, therefore, and despite having completed six months, have to safely eat on demand because they still have the ability to eat what they need and when they need it. This ability, called hunger, they have since they are born and lose it the day they die.
Know, discover, touch, try ...
The complementary feeding is to offer food so that the babies begin to try them, to know new textures, colors and flavors, and little by little to go passing from the milk to the food. It is, little by little, becoming a child; Little by little, go eating real food.
Vegetable? Well yes, if you like it, yes. Fruit? Also, if you like it, too. Veal? Yes he likes it, yes. But if you don't like it, then you will eat it ... no need to torture a baby with it. He is offered one day, and if he does not like it, he will be given another day again, and if not, another day, after a few people eat other things ... in the end, as they repeat a taste, they end up accepting it .
But not all, there are some who hate them equally because they really don't like them. Well, they turn away from food. Eating has to be stimulating and a moment of enjoyment: no food is essential and no 6-month-old baby has to eat vegetables because suddenly he needs to eat it because if he doesn't lack vitamins or something like that. In addition, there are many types of vegetables and many different fruits ... there is much to offer.
Sometimes they don't want something at six months and then a year they start eating it. Sometimes years go by without trying a food and then, seeing that the elders eat it, they start eating it too. Sometimes they don't eat because we are giving them everything crushed and they would prefer to go from the tit to the macaroni. And they often do it, they suddenly eat, because nobody presses them, because everyone considers them as good or valid food as the rest.
That is why it is recommended that, for them to accept food, let them take them and eat them, without anyone forcing or cheating. They are smarter than we think, and to which the forces, oblige or deceive, think that it is really something that is very bad and begin to refuse to eat it.
Photos | iStock, Gall on Flickr
In Babies and more | Advancing complementary feeding so that babies gain more weight is a mistake. Despite the recommendations most babies start complementary feeding early, Nutrition experts warn that parents take a long time to offer uncrushed food to babies
