- For women that can breastfeed, The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusively breastfeeding during the first 6 months of life and breastfeeding along with offering complementary foods until 12 months of age. Breastfeeding offers a wide range of benefits to both mother and child!
- Infants are very good at knowing how much they need to eat. They usually know when they have taken enough during each feeding and will stop eating when they are full. Time between feedings can range from 1-3 hours during the first few weeks of life and extend to longer intervals as your baby grows, especially when solid foods are introduced at 6 months of age.
- Although all children are different, an easy estimation tool is that most bottle-fed infants take in 1 oz per feeding per each week of life up until 8 weeks (2 oz per feeding at 2 weeks, 3 oz per feeding at 3 weeks, etc). At 8 weeks of age and older, bottle-fed infants should be offered 6-8 oz per feeding.
- For most babies, we recommend waiting to start any complementary foods until 6 months of age. Breast milk and formula are much more nutrient and calorie rich which is important for the growth of your new baby. For some children who are larger on the growth chart, it may be reasonable to start introducing solid foods at 5 months of age.
- When you begin introducing new foods, start with single ingredient foods and only introduce one new food every 3 days so that you can identify any adverse reactions.
- You can start initially with rice cereal but the order of the other foods introduced isn’t of much importance
- Try to add foods high in iron such as iron-fortified infant cereal or pureed meats as breastfed babies often start losing their iron stores between 4 and 6 months of age.
- Almost all formulas are fortified with iron and Vitamin D. Breastfed babies should be given Vitamin D supplementation (400 IU per day) as breast milk does not contain Vitamin D.
- We do not suggest offering your child any kind of juice before 12 months of age. Even after 12 months, we recommend less than 4 oz a day of 100% fruit juice. Eating whole fruit is a healthier alternative!
