As we have explained in previous days, complementary feeding should begin to be offered after six months of age. That moment coincides with the moment when children "become dumb."
Well, it is not that they literally become silly, but that the six months is the time when parents take away the children the autonomy of deciding the amount of food they should take (and then we say that we want autonomous children) and instead of trusting them we begin to ask ourselves:How much does my child have to eat?.
Babies decide how much they want and when they want it, so it is said that breastfeeding has to be on demand and that the bottle also has to be on demand. Interestingly, this is how the best results are obtained in terms of growth and weight gains.
One good day they turn six months, they go to the control visit with their pediatrician and the confidence in the baby is completely withdrawn: "Half a banana, half a pear, half an apple and the juice of half an orange". "Three beans, half a potato, a tomato and 30 grams of chicken."
These are just two examples of how children, who knew exactly how much and when to eat, lose the ability to decide what they should eat.
AdvertisingWhen displaying menus of this type the control of the feeding of the baby is transferred to the mother, which prepares what they have recommended for your baby, appearing almost immediately the first concerns.
It is extremely common (too, I would say), to listen to hesitant mothers to tell the menus their children take, with schedules and quantities, to know if they do well or if they should not eat more.
The fact is that the typical recommendations are usually high, as are the expectations of the mothers. This causes many children to end the syndrome of the "bad eater child", even though he is gaining weight correctly.
As I did in the post of "The bottle is also given on demand", I return data on the energy needs of children (Butte, 2000). As you can see the variability is enormous:
As a curious fact, if we look at the maximum energy that a six-month-old male baby, 779 kcal / d, and the minimum daily amount that a 2-year-old male boy, 729 kcal / d, may need, we see that a child of six months may need more food than a 2 year old.
Imagine the hypothetical situation in which a 2-year-old boy and his 6-month-old cousin are sitting together to eat and that both eat virtually the same amount of food. Most likely, the 2-year-old receives a sermon because "he eats nothing" and is even compared to his cousin: "Come, eat ... Look at Alex, see?" He is only six months old and eats the same as you. Really, Maria (sister), tomorrow I'll take him to get vitamins or something. ”
Knowing the amount of daily kcal a baby needs is really useless. First because as you can see the variations are impressive and second because nobody in their right mind will prepare a daily menu controlling the kcal that provide each child with food.
Children, therefore and despite having completed six months, still have the ability to eat what they need and when they need it. This skill, called hungryThey have it since they are born and lose it the day they die.
Does anyone tell us how much food we have to eat?
