You’ve done it—your baby is a few months old and happily established on their milk feeds (whether that’s breastfeeding, combination feeding, or formula feeding). You relax for a few weeks and enjoy this period of relative stability. Then you pop to your Aunty’s house for tea, and she asks when you’ll be starting your baby on solids. Your baby is only 4 months old, so you hadn’t thought about this yet, but your Aunty is convinced that she weaned her babies onto solids at this age and has started to worry you that your baby will be hungry if you don’t do the same. So, what are the current recommendations for weaning to solids?

The guidance since 2001 (so over twenty years) has been to start weaning at around 6 months, when your baby is showing signs of readiness for solids.

What are the signs of readiness for solids?

The baby has reached at least 6 months of age. In the 1980s and 1990s (when many of today’s new parents were born), the official advice was to wean babies at 4-6 months of age. Since this time, a continuing and growing body of research has pointed to the health benefits of waiting until babies are 6 months old. However, these earlier recommendations mean that it is possible that your parents will suggest the introduction of solids at an earlier age.
Baby has core stability. This means that your baby can sit (strapped into a highchair) for around 20 minutes without slumping over. This milestone is important as a safety measure against choking; a baby who cannot hold their core upright for this period of time is at higher risk of choking on their food. Since this milestone is about muscle strength, you can help them reach it. Lots of tummy time is great for the core, as are some short periods in the high chair with a toy to play with when you’re eating.
Baby has good hand-eye-mouth coordination. In order for your baby to eat effectively and not be reliant on you placing food in their mouth, they must have the coordination to see a relatively small object, pick it up, and place it in their mouth. You will likely have seen your baby do this with their toys (one of the reasons that baby toys need to be larger in order to be safe!).
The baby has lost the tongue thrust reflex. This is a reflex that babies are born with that is protective against choking in the early months. This reflex causes babies to sense a foreign object in their mouths and to use their tongue to push it back out. Now, it’s clear that this is hugely beneficial to babies early on, but it would make chewing and swallowing food challenging.

What are NOT signs of readiness for solids?

I wake up more frequently at night. When your baby is first born, they are operating on a 24-hour schedule with little regard to “day” and “night”. Once they reach around 2 months of age, you may find yourselves enjoying slightly longer stretches of sleep, with some babies even managing 5 or 6 hours in a row. Then, at around 4 months of age, this all appears to “go backwards,” with them starting to wake much more frequently. This is not connected to hunger but rather to the maturation of the sleep cycle (see our sleep journey for more information).
Increasing the frequency of milk feeds. Your 4- or 5-month-old baby is a super-curious and easily distracted little person. This can mean that they struggle to stay still or focused for long enough to take a full feed. Especially true for breastfed babies, this age child tends to take ‘the edge off’ their hunger before unlatching and wanting to carry on with their very busy day. This inevitably means that they get hungry again sooner, which often leads to 12–16 microfeeds in a day rather than 6–8 larger ones. This is a very normal (although sometimes frustrating!) stage, and it doesn’t usually mean that they’re taking in more milk overall than they were previously.
Chewing their fists. Babies are oral explorers, which means that they gain a lot of sensory information from their mouths. As soon as they have the coordination to do so, most babies spend a lot of time with their fists, toys, and even their own feet in their mouths. This is a normal developmental stage and not connected to food, although it’s a necessary skill to have, as mentioned above.
Watching you eat. Lots of parents tell me that they know their babies are ready for solids because they are fascinated by their parents eating. We have to remember to think about this from a baby’s point of view. They have no idea that you are eating or satiating hunger, as they’ve never experienced this themselves. I believe that they are simply amazed by the'magic trick’ that you do with food. Think about it: you pick something up, put it in your mouth, close your mouth, and when you open it back up again, the food has disappeared! That’s a pretty cool trick and definitely worthy of their attention. Everything that we do is interesting to our children, but that doesn’t mean that they are ready to do these things themselves. Our children avidly watch us drive cars and drink wine, but this doesn’t mean they are ready to go themselves!
Milk isn’t ‘enough’ for them anymore. In actuality, milk (breast or formula) is an incredibly calorie-rich food. Breastmilk has 22 kcal per 30 ml (formula has 20 kcal per 30 ml), whereas typical weaning foods are very low in calories. For example, puréed carrots only have 7 kcal per 30 ml, puréed apples have 13 kcal per 30 ml, and pear has 16 kcal per 30 ml. If you wean too early, you run the risk of displacing appetite in your baby towards solids (they can only tolerate so much food in their stomachs at one time), and they can end up being nutritionally poorer because of it.

What about premature babies?

When your baby was born significantly before their due date, it can be tricky to know whether you should consider the 6 months of age to be their chronological age or their adjusted age. Unfortunately, there is no good research to help us give a definitive answer to this. A general guide would be to look for the other signs of readiness above and to speak to your medical team about the right approach in your specific case.

When should I wean onto solid foods?

For our Baby Feeding Journey, Unii Expert Wendy Lever shares when you should wean.