How to Introduce Your Baby to Solid Food

While it was once common to feed very young infants solid foods, most pediatricians now recommend waiting until between four and six months of age to begin adding solids to your baby’s diet. Between this timeframe there’s no exact way to tell when your child is ready, so you’ll have to trust your instincts. If your baby is drinking more than 32 ounces of breast milk or formula per day and still seems hungry, it may be time to add some variety to his diet.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Iron-fortified rice cereal is a good choice for baby’s first solid food. A meal can be anywhere between two and eight tablespoons. You don’t need to worry about the exact amount your baby is consuming since his primary source of nutrition will still be breast milk or formula until his first birthday, when it’s safe to wean to cow’s milk.
2. Many people believe it’s better to introduce your child to vegetables before fruit, since the sweet taste of fruit may make him unwilling to try other foods. However, it’s perfectly fine to introduce fruit first. Ensuring that your child consumes a variety of foods is more important than the order in which they are introduced.
3. Solids should be introduced one at a time to avoid possible allergy risks. Waiting three days to one week between foods will allow you to quickly identify the source of any problems. Once your baby has been introduced to all of the single ingredient fruits and vegetables, you can experiment with different fruit and vegetable combinations or simple meat and vegetable dinners.
4. Once your child is about nine months of age and has front teeth for biting, it’s safe to give him unsalted rice cakes, zwieback toast, and Cheerios. In addition to being nutritious, these items are the safest finger foods for your baby since they dissolve quickly when mixed with saliva to minimize the risk of choking.

Tips & Warnings

• Many babies need to taste a new food multiple times before they accept it, so patience is the key to successfully introducing your child to solids. Like adults, babies do have definite food preferences.