Is your child picking up food from your plate? Is she showing an interest in different foods at the table? Can your baby sit up securely? Is your baby starting to put food in his mouth?
If the answer to these questions is yes, this is the time to methodically introduce solid food. You will usually see these signs at 6 months of age.
At this stage, great care is needed to shape your child’s taste buds to appreciate the flavors and aromas of nourishing foods. It’s easy to gravitate to giving children sweets, but once you go down that road, it’s hard to refine your child’s palate.
The problem with sugar
Chinese medicine has recorded for millennia the negative effects of sugar for children. When a child overeats sweets, the spleen is impaired.
The spleen’s role is to separate clear from turbid byproducts of the food we eat. When healthy, clear nutrients work their way through our body into our blood, organs, cells, etc. turbid waste is eliminated.
If the spleen cannot separate the two, dampness results. Symptoms of too much dampness include:
- loose stools
- phlegm
- colds
- ear infections
- asthma symptoms
See our article on Why Babies & Children Get Sick to learn more.
Additional food cautions
As we wrote about in our post Solid Food for your Infant or Toddler, children at this age need to eat cooked foods. Cooking is a way to begin the digestive process by breaking down cell walls and allowing the body to absorb nutrients.
The Baby Congee Rice Soup recipe is an important first food because it builds qi, blood, and other body fluids while being easy for the stomach to digest.
Rice congee is wonderful for babies’ sensitive digestive systems
Easy digestion in turn helps the spleen do its job more effectively, reducing dampness and phlegm in the body.
Also, try not to feed your child foods that are OVER nutritious. “What? Foods can be too nutritious?” you ask. Yes.
Remember, infants’ and toddlers’ digestive systems are developing and sensitive. Greasy, fatty, hard-to-digest proteins can cause blockages or entirely pass through the digestive tract without the child gaining any benefit from the food because she cannot digest it. Meats, eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese, etc. are examples of these foods.
Other foods cautioned against for millennia as hard for infants and toddlers to digest are water logged wheat items, such as noodles, breads, crackers, or any wheat children soak in their mouths before swallowing. These foods hurt the spleen and cause stagnation and illness.
Easy to feed wheat products often contain high amounts of sugar. They also become water logged when children eat them and hurt the spleen, causing stagnation and illness.
General guidelines for introducing foods
Chinese medicine has followed a food introduction cycle for thousands of years. These tested guidelines can help you with your child. Introduce one food at a time and watch carefully for signs of digestive problems.
One food at a time lets you know if a particular food is causing a problem. If there is a problem, stop the offending food for the time being and wait two weeks to one month to reintroduce.