Healthy Parenting Choices: Understanding Good Diet Choices for Babies

By Damian Papworth

One of the major events in your child's maturation process is the introduction of solid food instead of breast milk or formula. For most children, this occurs sometime around six months mark, but children aren't ready for table food until around the age of two years. Thus, baby food must be specially prepared, made so that a young child can easily eat and digest. While fast food and convenience are more a part of households now than ever before, that approach should not be taken with something as important as introducing children to food and nutrition, especially since those first years are a time of so much learning and development.

The first years of a child's life are crucial for getting the proper start, especially while so much growth is taking place. Babies are growing and maturing at a rapid rate, developing their coordination and learning about the world, and it is important that children receive the right kind of fuel to take on each new and exciting day. Therefore making the right choices in nutrition is a crucial component of parenting, just as important as ensuring that your child has a safe and healthy environment for playing and sleeping.

While purchasing baby food has been a long standing tradition in parenting, more and more parents are opting to make at least a portion of the food they serve their children at home. Making baby food is an excellent choice on a number of different levels. Many children have food allergies, and preparing food at home makes it easy to single out what potentially troublesome ingredients are. Furthermore, a great deal of store-bought baby food has additives, and preparing your own meals is a great deal healthier.

Preparing food at home is also a welcome burden relieved from many family wallets. After all, it's a great deal more expensive in general to buy pre-packaged food of all varieties, and baby food is no different. Best of all, it's one of the occasions in life when you can save money and make something healthier than it would be from the store.

Knowing when to start your child on solid food is a personal decision made by parents, but a number of important health organizations, including The American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend that breast-feeding take place until six months of age, at which point switching to solids will not compromise the amount of nutrition a child is receiving.

Other important signs in knowing if it's time to switch: can your child sit upright with support? Is he or she done with the "tongue reflex," called such because young children will shove any object that is solid out of their mouth with their tongue, almost instinctively? If it's past this point, then it's the perfect time to start on solid foods.

Starting simple is the most important step in introducing solid food to an infant's diet. Don't get too fancy, or try to compensate for lack of breast milk with an overabundance of dairy. The best choices are often simple fruits and vegetables, usually referred to as superfoods when discussing adult diets. Apples, pears, and bananas are excellent fruits, since pureeing them is easy and they are packed with nutritious vitamins and minerals. Vegetables that are commonly the first introduced to children's diets include squash, peas, carrots, and sweet potatoes.

When babies are starting to eat, an excellent first recipe is cooked and pureed carrots. A root vegetable packed with beta carotene and vitamin C, as well as calcium, carrots provide much of the nutrition that children need to grow. First peel the carrots, then steam them. After that, pureeing them should be a breeze. - 17268

About the Author:

Raising an infant does not need to spoil your home. Damian Papworth understands that high chair aesthetics are crucial. Yes you can buy baby high chairs that look great in your home.