We tell you why it is a mistake to put food in the baby’s mouth, distract him to eat and feed him separately.
Eating should be a pleasant act for the baby. An opportunity to enjoy food, develop psychomotor skills, learn new things, and be with mom and dad. But many times, wrong, we deprive him of all that.
Feed him
The reason for giving him other foods besides breast (or artificial milk) is not nutritional, but educational. It is not that at a certain age your needs increase and that is why we offer you a better diet. Fruit and flour are not? Better? than milk. On the contrary, it is the newborn who needs a very special diet, or breast milk, or a product specially prepared in a laboratory to make it look a little like breast milk. From six months on, as her needs are no longer so great, she can tolerate a “worse” diet, foods that do not substitute but only complement milk.
What we want, then, is for the child to learn to eat normally. That is, normal food (the one that their parents eat, at first slightly adapted) and eating normally (with their own hand or fork, without grinding).
The baby who takes a noodle, a pea or a piece of chicken to his mouth is learning: he learns to take by hand, to put in his mouth, to chew and swallow, to distinguish the flavors and textures of different foods, to decide what he likes more and what he likes less, when he is hungry and when he has already eaten enough.
Instead, the baby they? Plug? a whole plate of puree, based on distracting it and making the plane with the spoon, learns nothing: it does not distinguish flavors because everything is mixed, it does not chew, it only swallows liquids, it cannot decide if it is hungry or not because it is they will put it the same. He learns nothing and on top of that he has consumed less calcium, fewer vitamins, less nutrients than if he had taken milk. That porridge has not served him at all.
Feed him apart
Eating for the human being is a deeply social act. We meet to eat with friends, we eat at parties and celebrations, and from unfriendly people we say, “You have to feed them separately.” Why feed our children separately?
From the age of six months, most babies will prefer to eat sitting on our lap while we eat or sitting next to us in their chair. Eating at the same time, in addition to facilitating socialization, has an important advantage: parents, busy with their own food, cannot dedicate themselves to forcing the child.
Distract you to eat more
It’s funny how disciplinary rules are changing. Decades ago it was “at the table you don’t play”. Manners came first, and the boy who started to play was left without food. But the parents of today seem so obsessed with the child eating, eating at all costs, eating first and foremost, that they are capable not only of consenting, but of encouraging play at the table. They distract the child with toys, with TV, with regional dances, with whatever.
Aside from being very bad manners, distracting a child while eating can be dangerous. If a five-year-old boy starts to play, jump, run and laugh with food in his mouth, his mother will immediately shout (and rightly so) “Get that out of your mouth, you’re going to drown.” A baby who eats should be focused on what he does; It is not wise to distract him, or make him laugh to open his mouth, much less put food in his mouth while crying.