There was a moment a couple of weeks ago, as I watched my two-year-old son polish off a chicken madras alongside a huge helping of wild garlic tzatziki, where I felt, for a second, total smugness. “My boy eats anything! Even spicy food! Even food so garlicky it’s antisocial! I did this! I’m the best mother! Bow down to me all other mothers!” I could not have been prouder had he washed the whole thing down with a glass of cold Sancerre before demanding a digestif. But then I thought: Ugh, get a life.
I was reminded of it this week when the New Yorker ran a piece lauding the modern parenting trend of baby-led weaning, which boils down to allowing your baby to palm and mouth large bits of solid food as opposed to blending and pureeing everything, while you sit and wait patiently – for you have nothing better to do – for a carrot to be dissolved by their gums. I don’t mean to sound dismissive, but it catapulted me back to those early days of solids, not a phase of motherhood that I enjoyed, especially. I was too worried about choking, for a start, plus my boy was preterm, so he wasn’t ready to start solids at the same time as his peers. Yet some people, mostly influencers and other mothers, seemed terribly keen for me to do baby-led weaning. I’d even go as far as to say that they were invested. (The low point was when one woman actually came up to us in the pub and said that she felt “very strongly” that we should try it.)
“What is this strange cult that wants me making muffins from courgettes?” I found myself wondering. Even the New Yorker article, which is very pro baby-led weaning, references “baby-led-weaning ‘extremists,’ guilt-trippers and concern-trollers who take a my-way-or-the-highway approach to particulars like the proper order in which to introduce certain foods, or imply that a child’s picky eating is the fault of a parent who preferred purées.”
These seemed to be the same women I had encountered online and off when weaning my son, and I still wonder why they cared so much. Was maternity leave doing strange things to their idle brains, and so all that frustrated intellectual energy became diverted towards being “the best” in the domestic sphere? I was working during my maternity leave – writing a column every week about my experience of motherhood, and also a novel – so didn’t feel I had time to sit for hours waiting for him to feed himself, nor time to devote to extra cleaning. Nor, after the anxieties of breastfeeding a preterm baby, did I feel I wanted to rely solely on a seven month-old’s motor skills as a way of ensuring he got enough nutrients (sometimes a bit of spoon-feeding is the only way).
See how I’m justifying my approach to you? It’s bizarre that I feel I need to. It never bothered me how other mothers chose to feed their babies – breast or formula, baby-led or spoonfed – I only minded if they were pompous or mean about it, or implied their way was better. Like most parents, we used a mixed approach: his father and I pureed some fruit and veg, or made a daal or a soup, or blended what we were having. Then, when he was ready, we went on to larger bits of food. Had a couple of near choking incidents where I felt my soul leave my body, so did smaller chunks for a while. Mostly spoonfed, and then felt deep shame when nursery said we needed to work on his eating skills. Then bought all the cookbooks and became that mother in the playground with the homemade baked goods containing spinach, while all the while being very grateful for the existence of the Ella pouch. (In fact, the baby pouches were a great way of helping him try more complicated flavours, because he’d be more keen to try things if a bit of pouch was mixed in, and are also a godsend when he’s unwell.)
So I’ve done it all, in a way not dissimilar to how my birth was so complicated that I technically had all the births. And as with birth, weaning feels like just another way for women to be competitive with each other, especially middle-class, professional, high-achieving women, as this reel so brilliantly satirises. “The first food that she gave her daughter was foraged nettles” – this is an actual line from the article – “… her favorite foods are sardines, anchovies, olives, umeboshi plums, capers.” Spare me. My son has had cold bolognese piped directly down his gullet while he sat watching Postman Pat. Yet somehow, miraculously, he also loves an anchovy.
When, after the New Yorker piece came out, I wrote some of this on Instagram, I was inundated by messages from other women saying they felt the same way. The main response I got was that most children know their own minds and that there’s really not very much you can do if they decide to have a picky eating phase, as many children will regardless of how they are fed. Mothers are carrying too much pressure and guilt on their shoulders already, without feeling bad about their 8 month old spitting out their chimichurri.
I can understand how in the US – where fruit puree pouches for babies have been recalled due to lead contamination – you might not trust baby food. I mostly home cook, but I still think our baby food is great! All hail the pouch and the melty puff! And, baby-led weaning may be a “huge trend in Europe”, but many parents in European countries still use purees. How a mother – and it’s almost always the mother – chooses to feed her child has always been political, but how about we relax a bit and let people do what they feel is best for their own babies? Baby-led weaning can be brilliant – one twin mum wrote to me that she wouldn’t have got her children fed otherwise – but equally, monkeys chew food before giving it to their young, just as humans will have done at one evolutionary stage: essentially making a puree. The puree is not the enemy. It can even be your friend. Enough of all this competitiveness. It’s just another way of keeping women distracted from plotting the revolution. It’s becoming parodic, not to mention boring. And in a year, I promise you, it really won’t matter.