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Weaning Textured Foods and The Benefits of Texture Progression
Discover the benefits of adding food textures to your baby’s meals and how texture progression supports chewing skills, confidence and healthy eating habits.
Have you ever really thought about how many skills your baby needs, and how much they need to learn, in order to eat? Eating, a bit like riding a bike, is a complex learnt skill. Babies don’t just wake up one day knowing how to do it!
Until now, you might think it’s just about learning to bite, chew and swallow (which we are going to concentrate on in this article) but it’s actually about so much more than that. Below are some of the key areas your baby is mastering; often all at the same time, which can explain why weaning sometimes feel like a slower process than parents expect.
- Social and family learning: understanding the dynamics of your family mealtimes.
- Postural control: sitting in a highchair and focussing on eating
- Sensory processing: adjusting to new textures, tastes, temperatures and the feel of food in and around the mouth.
- Understanding hunger and fullness cues: learning that solid food satisfies hunger in a similar way to milk feeds.
- Developing oral motor skills: moving food around the mouth, learning how to bite, chew and swallow.
In this article, we are going to concentrate on why introducing lumps into your baby’s food is so important. Learning to eat doesn’t just ‘happen’ it has to be learnt like so many of the skills your baby is developing. Learning to accept flavours and textures is no different; without some consideration your little one may struggle to accept a wide range of foods when they are older.
Even small changes in texture can positively impact your baby’s development. If like many Mums and Dads, you are feeling worried or nervous about moving onto lumps and finger foods; that is totally understandable.
For more guidance on introducing textured foods, explore our advice on moving through textures and finger food safety.
Why introducing lumps matters
1. Learning to eat is a skill
Moving away from puree foods and onto foods with lumps plays an important role in oral development. Babies are born with an involuntary suck reflex; up until around 4 months of age if you put a finger, nipple or bottle teat into their mouth they will automatically suck, so early milk feeding is very intuitive. Eating solid food though is a completely different process that has to be learnt over time.
Challenging with textures helps this process to move along. Smooth purées are an important starting point, but they don’t ask much of the mouth once a baby has learned to take food from a spoon and mastered their lip seal. Lumpy and textured foods encourage babies to actively engage with the food, helping them practise the skills they need to eat more complex foods later on.
Research shows that babies who are introduced to lumpy foods between around 6 and 9 months are more likely to progress onto family foods and experience fewer feeding difficulties than those who stay on smooth purées for longer.
2. Oral development and chewing skills
Eating is a complex process; there are over 30 muscles and nerves involved in chewing and swallowing which all need to be coordinated. Your baby needs to bring food into the mouth off of a spoon, move it to an appropriate place, chew to the right texture and then form into a ball (known as a bolus) to swallow. This process often requires lots of practice!
Research into the development of chewing shows that these skills don’t mature automatically, they develop through experience. It might not feel like a huge change, but the coordination required to take puree off a spoon is quite different to moving lumps around in the mouth to chew and swallow.
Early chewing starts to strengthen muscles in the jaw and requires movement of the tongue all around the mouth to make sure food is eaten safely. For example, biting a piece of food off with the front teeth and then transferring it to the back molars with the tongue for chewing. You do it without thinking, but your baby needs to learn! These movements will also start to form the foundations for making sounds; so, every opportunity to practice will make a difference.
Every time a new texture is placed into the mouth, your baby has to learn what to do with it. Even tiny variations in texture give your baby important practice. The tongue may move from side to side, the lips will close and the jaw will be controlled. These are the skills that your baby will use when they start to form sounds and words. So introducing lumps is about more than just learning to eat. It gears them up for starting to speak too.
Having a mixture of different foods; perhaps a jar of our spaghetti bolognese with lumps to explore alongside a broccoli floret or two is a perfect combination.
3. Texture exposure and fussy eating
Introducing a variety of textures during weaning doesn’t just support skill development, it can also affect a baby’s willingness to eat foods later on in life. Research shows that babies who haven’t started eating lumpy foods by the time they are 9 months may experience more feeding difficulties and fussiness in childhood than those who start earlier.
Offering a variety of textures early, in a safe, gradual way, helps babies to feel more confident which is why we recommend moving gradually through purees, mashed, minced and then chopped foods. This doesn’t mean rushing or forcing progression. It’s about gentle exposure and variety, building skills step by step.
Conclusion
Introducing lumps doesn’t need to mean sudden scary changes. Even small variations in texture give your baby some much needed practice. This might look like offering a lumpy jar meal alongside a soft vegetable floret, or gradually moving from smooth purées to mashed foods with soft pieces to explore.
By supporting your baby to move through textures during weaning, you’re helping them learn how to eat, to develop the muscles they need for chewing (and speaking!), and to build confidence with food which may help to reduce fussy eating further down the line.
As with all things in parenting, there isn’t a right way to do this. Remember, every baby moves at their own pace so try not to compare to other babies and make sure you offer variety, keep things relaxed and know that learning generally takes time.
