Starting Solids: When and How to Begin Weaning

Weaning is the first thing since birth where you have to make a real decision about feeding, and everyone has an opinion. Your mother started you at twelve weeks and you turned out fine. Someone at baby group is doing purees and someone else is horrified by purees. Meanwhile your baby is eyeing your toast with genuine intent.

Here is what the guidance actually says, and what it means on a Tuesday morning in your kitchen.

Why Around Six Months

NHS guidance is to introduce solid food at around six months. Before that, your baby's digestive system and kidneys are still maturing, the tongue-thrust reflex pushes food back out, and milk genuinely provides everything they need.

Never before four months. That is the firm floor, not a suggestion. Between four and six months, if you have a specific reason to consider starting, that is a conversation with your health visitor or GP rather than something to decide from an article.

The word doing the work is around. Six months is not a deadline, and a baby who is not showing the signs at 25 weeks is not behind. Readiness matters more than the date on the calendar.

The Three Signs, and the Three That Fool Everyone

Your baby needs all three of these, not one or two.

• They can sit up and hold their head steady. Supported sitting is fine, but the head control has to be theirs. This matters for swallowing safely.
• They can coordinate eyes, hands and mouth. They can look at food, pick it up, and get it to their mouth. Not neatly, but deliberately.
• They can swallow rather than push food out. The tongue-thrust reflex fades around six months. If food consistently comes straight back out on the tongue, they are not ready yet.

Now the ones that convince thousands of parents to start too early, because they look exactly like hunger:

• Waking more at night. Extremely common around four months and driven by sleep cycle changes, not hunger.
• Watching you eat intently. Babies watch everything you do from about three months. It is interest, not readiness.
• Chewing fists. Also from about three months, and usually teething or discovering hands exist.
• Being a big baby, or a small one. Size tells you nothing about digestive readiness.

If your baby is doing the second list but not the first, that is a completely normal four to five month old.

Purees, Baby Led Weaning, or Both

This is where the internet gets tribal, and honestly it should not. Both approaches work, and most families end up doing a mixture without ever deciding to.

Purees mean starting with smooth textures on a spoon and progressing to lumpier ones. Easier to know how much went in, less mess, and reassuring if choking worries you.

Baby led weaning means offering soft finger foods from the start and letting your baby feed themselves. It develops motor skills, they self-regulate intake, and they eat what you eat, which is genuinely easier at dinner time.

A mixture is what most people actually do: a spoon of yogurt or porridge plus a soft strip of something they can hold. There is no rule against it and no evidence that mixing causes confusion.

What matters far more than the method is the same for both: start with single foods, introduce allergens deliberately, and keep milk going.

The First Two Weeks, Realistically

The purpose of the first fortnight is not nutrition. It is practice: getting used to texture, taste and the mechanics of eating. Milk remains their main source of everything.

Offer once a day at first, at a time when your baby is alert and not ravenous. A baby who is desperate for milk will not be interested in learning to eat.

Start with vegetables, particularly the less sweet ones. Broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, courgette. Babies are naturally drawn to sweet flavours, so there is an argument for meeting the bitter ones first while they are most open.

Expect almost nothing to be swallowed. Most of it will end up on the floor, the wall and the baby. That is the process working, not failing.

Build to three meals a day over roughly six to eight weeks, adding a second meal around week three or four.

Foods to Avoid in the First Year

A short list, and each has a real reason behind it.

• Honey, until twelve months. Infant botulism risk. This one is absolute, including cooked into food.
• Whole nuts and grapes, and anything similar. Choking hazard. Nut butters and ground nuts are fine and encouraged; whole nuts are not until around five. Grapes need quartering lengthways.
• Added salt. Their kidneys cannot handle it. No stock cubes, gravy, or salting their portion. Watch bread, cheese and processed foods for hidden salt.
• Added sugar, which offers nothing and shapes preferences early.
• Raw or lightly cooked eggs unless they carry a British Lion mark, in which case UK guidance accepts them.
• Rice drinks, until at least five, because of arsenic levels.
• Low fat versions of anything. Babies need the fat. Full fat yogurt and milk in food.

Milk Does Not Stop

The most common misunderstanding about weaning is that food replaces milk. It does not, not for a long time.

Breast milk or formula remains your baby's main source of nutrition until around twelve months, with solids gradually taking over through the second half of the first year. Keep milk feeds going as normal at first; they will naturally reduce as eating increases.

Cow's milk can be used in food from six months, but not as a main drink until twelve months. Water in an open or free-flow cup can be offered with meals from the start of weaning.

The single most important companion to this article is our guide to introducing allergens safely, because current guidance on that has reversed from what many parents were told, and getting it right matters.

Good First Foods, and Why

Starting suggestions that are easy to prepare and hard to get wrong.

Soft cooked vegetable sticks: broccoli florets with a stalk to hold, carrot batons cooked until squashable, sweet potato wedges, courgette. Cook until they yield easily when pressed between your finger and thumb. That squash test is the standard for any finger food.

Soft fruit: banana with the peel half on so it is grippable, ripe pear or peach, avocado. Ripeness matters; a firm pear is a choking hazard where a soft one is not.

Iron-rich foods, sooner than you think. Babies are born with iron stores that start running low around six months, which is one reason weaning begins then. Well-cooked minced meat, lentils, beans, and iron-fortified cereal all count, and offering vitamin C alongside helps absorption. This is the nutrient most worth paying attention to in the first months of solids.

Full fat dairy in food: plain full fat yogurt, cheese in cooking, milk mixed into cereal. Not as a main drink until twelve months, but as an ingredient from six.

What Normal Progress Actually Looks Like

Rough shape rather than a schedule, because babies vary enormously and comparison causes more anxiety than anything else in the first year.

Six to seven months: one meal building to two. Very little swallowed. Milk unchanged. Success is your baby touching food and putting it near their mouth.

Seven to nine months: two to three meals, more texture, more actually consumed. Lumpier purees, softer finger foods, and the beginnings of a pincer grip. This window matters for texture progression; babies who stay on smooth purees too long can find lumps harder to accept later.

Nine to twelve months: three meals plus snacks, eating close to what you eat with salt and sugar left out. Milk feeds naturally reduce.

Days when nothing gets eaten are entirely normal, including several in a row. Appetite swings wildly with teething, illness and growth. As with pregnancy nutrition, judge it over a week rather than a meal.

When to Ask for Help

Most weaning wobbles resolve themselves, but a few things are worth raising with your health visitor or GP rather than waiting out: consistent refusal of all solids well beyond seven months, difficulty progressing past smooth textures by nine or ten months, repeated coughing or distress with feeding, poor weight gain, or any reaction that makes you suspect an allergy. None of these are emergencies, and all are much easier to sort early.