Starting solids generates more anxiety than almost anything else in the first year, and most of that anxiety is spent on the wrong question. Purée or baby-led weaning is the decision parents agonise over; the evidence says it barely matters. Choking risk, allergen timing and what you leave off the plate entirely are the decisions that do. This page is the map of our solids section, and it puts the weight where the evidence puts it.
When to start
In the UK, the NHS advises starting at around six months, when three signs are there together: your baby can stay in a sitting position and hold their head steady, can coordinate eyes, hands and mouth well enough to look at food, pick it up and put it in their mouth, and can swallow food rather than pushing it back out.[1] Age alone is not the signal — plenty of babies hit six months without all three, and a few have them earlier. If you want to check them one at a time, our solids readiness quiz walks through them.
Method matters less than the marketing suggests
The BLISS trial in New Zealand set out to test the central claim made for baby-led weaning — that self-feeding improves energy self-regulation and lowers obesity risk. It did not find it. Mean BMI z-scores were not significantly different at twelve months or at twenty-four.[2] That result is worth knowing before you commit to a camp, in either direction.
35%
That number is the one that reframes the whole argument. Choking during weaning is common, it is not caused by the method, and baby-led infants gagged more at six months and less at eight — which is what learning to manage texture looks like from the outside.[3] The honest comparison, including where the observational literature disagrees with the trial and why the trial is the better guide, is in baby-led weaning vs purées.
The three things that actually carry risk
Choking
Round and firm is the dangerous combination, and breaking either property drops the risk sharply.[5] Telling gagging from choking is the single most useful skill to have before the first meal, because they look completely different and only one of them is an emergency: gagging vs choking covers that, and how to cut food by age covers the shapes and sizes that follow from it.[4]
Allergens
Once solids are established, introduce the common allergens deliberately rather than avoiding them — delaying peanut and egg does not protect against allergy and may raise the risk.[6] US guidance goes further for the highest-risk group, recommending early peanut introduction with medical assessment first for infants with severe eczema or existing egg allergy.[7] Allergen introduction covers the order, the timing and the one situation where you should speak to a doctor before starting at home.
What stays off the plate entirely
Some things are not a matter of texture or readiness: no added salt or sugar, no honey before one, no whole nuts before five, and no unpasteurised or raw foods.[8] This is a short list and it is worth knowing it exactly, because it is the part of weaning where an ordinary kitchen habit — seasoning the family food before serving the baby's portion — is the actual hazard.
What the first year looks like
| Stage | Meals a day | Textures | Milk |
|---|---|---|---|
| From around 6 months | 1, at whatever time suits you both | Smooth or mashed, plus soft finger foods | Breast milk or first infant formula on demand — still the main source of nutrition |
| 7–9 months | Building to 3 | Mashed and lumpy, more finger foods | Still every day, while iron starts coming from food rather than milk |
| 10–12 months | 3, established, with a pudding at lunch and tea | Mashed, lumpy, chopped and finger foods | Still alongside meals |
The stages come from the NHS guidance for each band.[9][10][11] The most common mistake across all three is keeping food smoother for longer than a baby needs, because it feels safer — it is not, and the comfortable window for meeting lumps and finger foods is in the second half of the first year. Baby food schedule: 6, 9 and 12 months has the detail, meal by meal.
When eating gets difficult
It usually does, somewhere in the second year, and it is usually normal. Two pages cover the pair of things that actually help: Division of Responsibility sets the conditions — you decide what, when and where; your child decides whether and how much — and food chaining is the technique for widening the list of accepted foods inside those conditions. They work as a pair, and neither works well alone.
Per-ingredient questions belong in the database
Whether broccoli goes in as florets or stalks at seven months, how to serve banana so it can actually be held, when oats work as a finger food — those are questions for our food database, which covers hundreds of ingredients with allergen ratings, choking-risk ratings and age-appropriate preparation for each. The articles in this section cover principles; the database covers your Tuesday. And if you want the developmental context around all of it, the milestones section runs on the same age bands.
What this guide deliberately does not do
It does not reproduce choking first aid. That is a taught physical skill and a page cannot deliver it — a short accredited course can, and it is worth doing before you start solids rather than after. It also does not cover the milk ladder or the egg ladder. Those are reintroduction protocols for a child with a diagnosed allergy, they belong under specialist supervision, and they are a different thing from introducing allergens to a baby who has never reacted to anything.
Everything in this section cites its sources, and where national guidance genuinely differs — the timing of the first spoonful being the clearest case — each version of the page follows its own market's authority rather than translating somebody else's.[1]
