My brother forwarded me an article about a report on when to introduce foods to babies in an online publication called “Science Daily.” In addition to reading about this topic, I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw many topics of interest to the parents of our baby grandchildren. On the topics pages, I found many topics of interest to us Boomer grandparents.
Unlike us when we were new parents, who lived in the dark ages and had little information about child rearing, the parents of our baby grandchildren have the internet and everything at their fingertips. I say they have too much information and do not have the life experience to know how to weigh the value of the information on the internet. We have a lifetime of parenting mistakes to look back on. Take a look at this on line resource and pass it along. ScienceDaily offers free access to the latest news via email newsletters that you can subscribe to at no charge, via Google’s FeedBurner service. Newsletters will be delivered to your email inbox automatically. To subscribe, do not hit “subscribe” as nothing happens. Hit the envelope which takes you to choices of newsletters by topic, of which there are dozens, medical, health and wellness related.
On Related Stories to the baby food introduction, I saw “Short Duration of Breastfeeding and Maternal Obesity Linked to Fatty Liver in Adolescents,” “Healthy Weight Gain in Infants,” “Cow Milk Is Added to Some Breast Milk, Sold to Parents Online, Study Finds,” “Commercial Baby Foods Don’t Meet Infants’ Weaning Needs,” all of which are interesting to new parents.
I have written prior posts on breast feeding. Take a look:
Baby Signals are Grandchildren’s Signals Forever and Not Just About Feeding A Hungry Baby
Grandma Cancer Alert: Too Many Young Women and Young Mothers with Breast Cancer
The complete article on the new study is at the link above. The article blurb states the following:
“The first study of a nationally representative group of US infants reports that more than half of babies are currently introduced to complementary foods, that is, foods or drinks other than breast milk or formula, sooner than they should be. Babies who were never breastfed or breastfed for less than four months were most likely to be introduced to foods too early. These findings emphasize the need to introduce foods at the proper time to get the most benefit from breast milk or formula.”
I then thought of how I fed our eldest chocolate fudge at three months and with our youngest added a baby teaspoon of cereal to the formula for the midnight feeding at three weeks to help her sleep longer. Boy, were we ignorant, but the parents of our grandchildren turned out fine.
Then, there are links. One of the links was to an article, “Moms Serve Up Solid Food Too Early in Life.”
It reported an old study, “that in the longitudinal Infant Feeding Practices Study II, 40.4% of U.S. mothers interviewed from 2005 to 2007 said they introduced solid foods to infants before they were 4 months old, according to Heather Clayton, PhD, MPH, of the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues.” Then the bang, the “American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) 2012 feeding recommendation to avoid giving solid foods until 6 months, 92.9% of their analytic sample would have been “early introducers,” means I was an evil mother. As a mantra, I always say, our children survived us and our grandchildren will survive their parents.
But, quality information is always welcome. It seems that ScienceDaily has information for us at any age too.
I have already subscribed to ScienceDaily. Take a look and I think you might find some quality information relevant to your life.
Joy,
Mema
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