Learning at the Table: Meal Time and Motor Skills

Learning at the Table: Meal Time and Motor Skills

March 4th, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

From the very first time your baby starts to eat solid baby food, a new opportunity is created to learn and practice new and important motor skills. Meal time isn’t just about eating! It’s also an important part of your child’s development.

Starting Early

Even though your baby is nowhere near ready to feed himself when he first starts on solid foods, there is no reason you can’t let him have his own spoon right from the start. Bring two spoons to each feeding, one for baby to hold and one for you to feed him. Soon he will start trying to imitate what you are doing with the spoon, dipping it into the food and bringing it to his mouth. It will be messy, but your baby is laying the foundation for feeding himself while learning new motor skills.

Finger Foods

Somewhere around 8 months old on average, your baby will be ready to start self-feeding in earnest. The right place to start is with finger foods that dissolve easily in the mouth but are fairly easy to pick up. Small chunks of banana or the classic baby snack, Cheerios cereal, are great choices for first finger foods. Using the thumb and forefinger to pick up small items, also known as the “pincer grasp” is an important milestone and finger foods will help to develop the fine motor skills required.

The Right Tools for the Job

When your baby is ready to really use utensils, she will need her own fork and spoon. Look for utensils with thick, easy to grasp handles made of a non-slip material. Plastic forks are good for early practice, but they will soon frustrate your little one as they don’t work very well. Instead, look for a metal fork with rounded tines to avoid potential injury, but enough of a point to allow easy spearing of food. When choosing a spoon, try to find one that is not too flat and won’t spill easily. Utensils should be short, as anything too long will be difficult for little arms to maneuver.

Getting Started with Utensils

Learning to use a fork and spoon are a great chance to work on manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. Although the spoon is the first utensil a baby encounters, most children will learn to use a fork faster, mainly because the food stays on the fork more easily than on a spoon. Start with an easy to spear food like small pieces of melon or pear. Place the fork in your child’s hand and guide her through the motions of spearing the food, and bringing it up to her mouth. You’ll be rewarded by the sight of her face lighting up with joy as she realizes she can eat just like you do!

Using a spoon requires even more skill than a fork. Learning the scooping and lifting motion to get food onto the spoon, and then the careful balance required to get the food all the way to the mouth are difficult tasks. Thick foods like oatmeal and yogurt are a great choice for learning this skill, as they will be less likely to spill off the spoon. Encourage your child to lean forward, towards the dish so that the spoon doesn’t need to travel so far.

The process of teaching your baby to self-feed can be messy, but remember that you are developing motor skills and life skills too!

The Importance of Mealtimes

The Importance of Mealtimes

February 22nd, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

When your baby is young, she eats when she is hungry. As she grows, her feedings might start to fall into a typical routine, but as she begins eating table foods, she should have firmly established mealtimes.

Solid Foods

As your baby begins eating solids, she is still getting the vast majority of her nutrition from formula or breastmilk. It is only over time as she eats full meals of solids that a shift will occur between milk and solids as the primary form of nutrition. Regardless of how much she needs the solids, once they are introduced, you should be feeding your child at mealtimes rather than sporadically throughout the day.

By a year, your child should be taking a cup or bottle only a couple of times a day and eating three full meals. She should also be enjoying two snacks a day – one in the midmorning and one in the mid afternoon. Toddlers have a small stomach and not much appetite on average. Serving many small meals of solid baby foods including healthy snacks is the best way to get all of the daily nutrients into her small system.

Establish Healthy Habits

One of the healthiest food habits you can have is to treat your food with respect. This is something you can help your child learn by taking mealtime seriously and not sabotaging meals with snacks too close to the meal or with distractions from the food at hand. Sitting down together for a meal as a family helps children eat healthier and encourages healthy relationships as well. Your baby will love being part of the family at mealtimes and will enjoy her own food more in your company – especially once she’s able to eat the same items you’re eating.

A Healthy Variety

Snacks should be one or two items offered in small portions, but a meal can include up to a third of the day’s caloric requirements. You should serve a variety of food at each meal to give your child an option of what to eat and to make picky eaters less trouble at mealtimes. So long as there are healthy options on the plate, you don’t need to trouble yourself about which options your picky toddler is choosing. Over the course of a few days, your child is likely eating all that is necessary – even it is one choice at each meal.

Establish a Comfortable Routine

Children of all ages are comfortable in a routine. Knowing when to expect at certain parts of the day makes them feel more at ease as they go about their day. The typical day for any child is anchored by mealtimes. If you have breakfast, lunch and dinner in a steady fashion day in and day out, you’ll be going a long way to giving your child the kind of structure she craves and you’ll be allowing her to live her life with an undistracted focus on play and discovery.

Introducing Solid Foods

Introducing Solid Foods

February 20th, 2010 by admin  |  No Comments

Solid baby foods mark a tremendous milestone for your baby and for you. It’s likely you have a photo or two of your first bites of cereal and you will soon have a page in your album dedicated to your child’s. Those first few bites of solid food are exciting, but can also be confusing.

Starting Solids

Until very recently it was recommended to start solid foods between four and six months of age. Now it is more often recommended to start solids closer to six months. Speak to your doctor about starting solids to determine if your child is ready and if it is an appropriate time.

You can look for indications your child is ready to start solid food:

  • He watches you eat your food with great interest.
  • He can sit up with support – preferably without.
  • He can hold up his head.
  • He open his mouth wide when offered food on a spoon.
  • He uses his lips to remove food from the spoon.
  • He turns his head away from food when he is full or disinterested.
  • He has lost the tongue-thrust reaction which pushes food back out of the mouth.
  • He can chew on his gums.
  • He seems to be hungrier more often for an ongoing amount of time.

You should start solids when your baby is ready, which might not be until closer to eight months, and not because you think solids are necessary for any other reason. Solid foods have not been shown to help babies sleep better. They also are not required because a baby is larger or smaller than average. The nutrition in formula and breast milk is enough to meet the dietary demands of a baby until eight or nine months, so there is not a nutritional reason to start solid before your child is ready.

The Solid Food Progression

Your child will work his way into solids by starting with just a few tastes of one item. The first item often given to babies is rice cereal. The rice should be mixed with formula or breast milk and should be just above runny in consistency. You don’t want to feed a thick spoonful to your child. Let your child practice with the rice cereal for three to five days before moving on. Rice is used because rice is not linked to many allergies.

You can introduce foods in any order, but meat and dairy product should be avoided until baby is closer to a year in age. Most parents opt to start with various grains followed by fruits and vegetables. You should wait three to five days after each new item to be sure your baby doesn’t have sensitivity to an item. Most food sensitivities at this age are resolved naturally as your child grows. If she does react, put that food aside for now and try again in a few months or a year. It will take months to make it through all the possibilities in grains, fruits and vegetables. When possible avoid using combination meals in baby food jars as these often contain filler items and are not as nationally sound as the straight fruit or vegetable.

You can make your own baby foods by pureeing cooked items with water to reach the right consistency. As your baby learns to chew and swallow more effectively you can increase the texture of the foods until you reach a mashed state – this is the ideal time to move to table foods.

Table Foods

Around nine months to a year your child will be ready for the same foods you’re eating at mealtimes with some exceptions. Avoid foods that are hard to chew, such as meat, as your baby is still forming teeth. You should also avoid foods that have a high risk of choking such as uncut grapes or hot dogs, popcorn, hard candy and peanut butter. Finally, delay the introduction to potentially allergenic foods until the first or possibly second year. These include strawberries, egg white, chocolate, nuts and honey – which is a health concern as well.