Nobody tells you how much to put on the spoon, how fast to go, or what to do when they turn their head away. The answers are simpler than you would expect, and one of them runs directly against everything you have watched other people do.
Around six months is the guidance, but the calendar is the least reliable of the signs. There are three, and a baby should be showing all three together — not one of them, and not two.
Supported is fine. Wobbling is not. A head that is still lolling cannot protect an airway.
They can look at food, pick it up, and get it to their mouth. This is the one that tells you the machinery is connected up.
The tongue-thrust reflex pushes anything solid straight back out. It fades on its own. If everything you offer comes immediately back, the answer is to wait a fortnight and try again.
Chewing fists. Waking in the night. Watching you eat. Wanting extra milk feeds. Being a big baby. Every one of these is normal behaviour that happens at this age regardless, and every one of them gets misread as "hungry for solids" — often with a nudge from someone selling baby rice. If in doubt, ask your health visitor.
The most common first mistake is offering far too much and then being disheartened when almost none of it is eaten. At six months, food is not about calories at all. Milk is still doing that job. Early meals are about learning to move food around a mouth and swallow it — a genuinely difficult motor skill.
| Age | Meals a day | Roughly how much | Milk |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 months | 1 | 1–2 teaspoons, building slowly. An ice cube is generous. | Still the main source. Unchanged. |
| 7–8 months | 2 | 2–4 tablespoons per meal | Still primary. 4–5 feeds. |
| 9–11 months | 3, plus a snack | 4–6 tablespoons, plus finger food | Beginning to reduce. Around 3–4 feeds. |
| 12 months+ | 3 meals, 2 snacks | Roughly a quarter to a third of an adult portion | Around 350–400ml whole milk a day. |
Appetite varies enormously day to day, and a baby who eats well on Monday and refuses everything on Tuesday is behaving completely normally. Growth is measured over months, not meals. What matters is the direction of travel on the growth chart, which is what your health visitor is watching — not what happened at lunch.
This is the most important thing on this page, and it will feel wrong, because almost everyone has watched a well-meaning adult do the opposite.
Babies are born able to regulate their own appetite. They eat when hungry and stop when full, and they do it more reliably than most adults manage. Every time an adult overrides that — the aeroplane spoon, one more for grandma, finishing what is in the bowl because it took effort to make — it teaches a child that the signal to stop eating comes from outside them rather than from inside.
That is a lesson which is very hard to unlearn at forty.
All of these mean the same thing. Stop.
Every one of these overrides a working system.
It is a useful way to hold the whole thing in your head. You decide what is offered, when, and where. Your child decides whether to eat it, and how much.
Staying on your side of that line removes almost every mealtime battle there is, because there is nothing left to have a battle about. It also means an untouched plate is not a failure — you did your job by offering it.
This one genuinely depends, and it is the question on this page most likely to need a real person who knows your baby.
A baby past the early weeks who is growing well and sleeping longer is doing something healthy, not something to be corrected.
Whether to wake your baby is a clinical question that depends on their weight, their age, their birth history and how feeding is going. Your midwife or health visitor can answer it in thirty seconds with the notes in front of them. If your baby is unusually sleepy, difficult to rouse, feeding much less than usual, or has fewer wet nappies than normal, contact them the same day.
A ravenous baby has no patience for a difficult new skill. Offering milk first, then solids about an hour later, works well at the start. Late afternoon, when everyone is tired, is the hardest time to begin anything.
Mess is not a side effect of learning to eat. It is part of it. A baby who has had their hands in the food has already learnt something about it before any of it reaches their mouth.
Wait for the mouth to open before offering the spoon. Rest the spoon on the lower lip and let them take it, rather than putting it in. It feels absurdly slow. It is how they learn to control the process.
Babies learn to eat by watching people eat. It is one of the most reliably effective things you can do, and it costs nothing.
No comment, no coaxing, no disappointment. Food goes away, mealtime ends, nobody minds. A baby who has never seen an adult be upset about food has one less thing to push against.
The research points to fifteen to twenty exposures, often more — and an exposure does not have to be eaten. Seeing it on the table counts. Most parents give up after three or four, which is well before the point at which acceptance usually happens. A refusal is information, not a verdict. More on fussy eating, and when it is something else →