My Lisa just turned 9 months old. We have constant wars with her over food. It is impossible to feed anything with a spoon - he compresses his lips, grimaces.

And if something gets into the mouth, it immediately spits out in all directions with exclamations of protest. In addition to unnecessary cleaning, as a mother, I am very concerned about the issue of her nutrition! Tell me what to do when a child at 9 months does not eat complementary foods?

I receive quite a lot of similar letters from you. And this says one thing: parents often have problems with the nutrition of babies up to a year old.

Well, let's figure out why a child at 9 months does not eat complementary foods.

When is it time for feeding?

It is pointless to introduce complementary foods before 6 months of age, because before this age, the necessary enzymes simply do not exist in the baby's gastrointestinal tract.

Moreover, if earlier artificial feeders were prescribed an earlier start of complementary foods, since the mixtures did not provide the growing body with all the elements it needs, today the situation has changed.

Modern milk formulas satisfy all the needs of the baby and you can safely introduce complementary foods only at 6 months.

Remember! It makes no sense to start feeding earlier. A small organism is not physiologically ready for the introduction of new products at an early age.

And, by the way, one of the reasons why a baby does not eat complementary foods at 9 months old may be precisely the early introduction of new food, which could provoke digestive problems and the child’s natural protest against this state of affairs.

However, there are other signs that the baby is ready for the introduction of complementary foods, you can use them to navigate and vary the time of its introduction:

• The baby doubled his birth weight (to find out what norms you should focus on, read the article Weight Gain in Newborns by Month >>>);
• The reflex of pushing out solid food with the tongue is gone;
• Shows interest in what parents eat

If for some reason the child has not reached the state of readiness, then the start of complementary foods may move more late dates, but do not pull longer than the age of 7 months of the baby.

The late start of complementary foods also leads to the fact that the child’s interest in food has already faded away and you see a picture that a child at 9 months may not want to eat complementary foods.

Other reasons for not feeding

There are also many physiological and psychological reasons why a baby at 9 months does not eat complementary foods.

Among the first are, for example, all kinds of ailments:

1. The baby has teething, tummy ache, fever due to colds or intestinal infections (read the article on Teething Temperature >>>);
2. Either the baby was vaccinated the other day and the little body is experiencing stress;
3. Remember the above signs of readiness to start complementary foods.

There are many more psychological reasons:

• Early introduction of complementary foods, when the child is not psychologically ready to receive new products, does not understand what it is and why it is needed;
• Violence or psychological trauma;

If a child is constantly force-fed, suppressing his protests, this only leads to their strengthening.

Maybe the first food the child tasted, he choked and got scared.

• Perhaps a child at 9 months does not eat complementary foods well, because he has not yet had time to get used to new taste sensations;

If you give him time, repeatedly suggesting a new product (but not pushing it in), he may soon try it out.

• The child's tastes are ignored.

Babies up to a year old can be very selective in food, and if the baby does not like some taste, it makes no sense to accustom him to this product without fail.

Remember! Feeding up to a year is only a quarter of the daily diet. The rest the baby should receive from breast milk or mixtures.

Therefore, if a child at 9 months does not eat meat or categorically rejects broccoli - to health. Calm down and offer him what you like. Spare the fragile psyche.

• Separate feeding;

If the baby is fed at the children's table, and the parents themselves do not eat at this moment, then the lack of an example of the parents can lead to the fading of interest in food.

In this case, the child begins to eat complementary foods worse and worse.

• Feeding during the game;

If the crumbs are trying to “screw” a spoon or two of adult food, enticing them with rattles, cartoons or having fun, they will most likely perceive this not as feeding, but as a game.

And your spoons, which you bring to your mouth, only distract and unnerve him. Don't try to combine food with play in your child's mind. In the future, this will play a cruel joke.

What to do?

So, what should parents do if their child at 9 months eats little (or refuses to eat at all) complementary foods?

1. Feed him at the common table so that he can see that his parents eat the same food and that they like it very much. That is, in a natural way, form his food interest;
2. Offer complementary foods when your baby is hungry, not after meals. So it is more likely that he will try new food;
3. If the baby refuses to eat from a jar (parents don’t eat that), cook your own food and feed from “adult” dishes;
4. If he does not want to eat from a spoon, let him wield his fingers. Yes, it is not so aesthetically pleasing, but it satisfies the natural research needs of the child;
5. Be patient. Sometimes, in order for the baby to taste the food, he needs to offer it up to 20 times! Naturally, only to offer, and not to push no matter what;
6. Look for an alternative. If a child at 9 months does not eat cottage cheese well, try giving him kefir. He doesn’t want broccoli - replace it with zucchini;
7. Do not listen to idle neighbors or relatives who say that their children at this age have already eaten a full plate of borscht;

• First, it's not exactly useful;
• And secondly, the development and needs of each child are individual, and it is necessary to focus on them.

With the help of the information from the course, you will work on the mistakes step by step and teach your baby to eat a lot, well and with appetite.

A good appetite in a child is a source of endless joy for parents. There is nothing more pleasant than to see how a child happily eats a cooked lunch, dinner or breakfast. But more often it is the other way around. Mom and grandmother tried to cook, and not just like that, but exactly what the little one loves. And the kid persistently refuses to eat and is naughty.

In some families, every meal turns into a real battle between the "unwanted" and his persistent parents. The child is persuaded, they try to deceive with various maneuvers and tricks, they insist and threaten that he will not get candy if he does not eat the soup. Is it necessary to try so hard and what to do if the child has a poor appetite, says the well-known pediatrician Evgeny Komarovsky.

Appetite is different

Without food, life is impossible, but appetite does not always come with eating. Natural appetite occurs when food is required by the body to replenish energy reserves in order to survive. And electoral accompanies modern man much more often. The child wants cookies because he likes them, and does not want porridge because cookies are better.

Selective appetite reflects the real picture of needs only in an infant; at 8-9 months, he intuitively feels that he needs calcium, and refuses to eat soup. Not because the soup is tasteless, but because milk is healthier. At the age of 1 year, 2 years, children prefer dairy products for the same reason.

If a one year old baby fundamentally does not eat meat, this does not mean that at 3-4 years old he will not start eating it with pleasure. It's just that for a 12-month-old baby, vegetables and fruits, cottage cheese and milk are more important. And he understands this intuitively.

Closer to 3 years, the problem of selective appetite, according to Komarovsky, is far-fetched - if a child does not eat vegetable puree and requires only chocolate and sausage, this is a common pedagogical mistake of mom and dad, and you should not look for any medical reasons for such behavior.

Why is the child not eating?

If the little one refuses to eat, he, according to Komarovsky, may have two reasons: he cannot or does not want to eat.

It cannot - this means that the appetite is present, but it is difficult to physically eat. For example, mother’s milk is tasteless (the woman ate something wrong), the hole in the nipple is too small, and the porridge is not sucked, etc. In infants, quite often, during sucking, the intestines begin to work actively, its peristalsis is activated at the wrong time . The tummy twists, the baby hurts, he stops eating and cries.

Quite often in a child, the root of the problem with appetite lies in the mouth. Stomatitis, inflamed gums during teething, microtrauma of the gums (scratches from toys that have been in the mouth or nails) - all this makes the process of eating food quite unpleasant.

Sometimes there is no appetite during colds or SARS. If the nose does not breathe, then during sucking, access to oxygen is blocked, which is uncomfortable, and the child stops eating. If the throat hurts and swallowing is unpleasant, refusal to eat will almost always follow.

Sometimes the child does not like the offered food itself - it is hot or too cold, salty or unsalted, large or mashed.

It all depends on the personal preferences of each individual child. If moms and dads managed to understand that the child wants to eat, but cannot, then it is best to consult a doctor to find and eliminate the obstacle that prevents the baby from eating normally.

If a child does not eat well or does not eat at all, not because eating gives him discomfort, then he simply does not want to eat. However, you should not immediately accuse him of hooliganism and insist that the porridge be eaten. Reluctance to eat also has its reasons:

• Disease. Even if the parents have not yet noticed that the baby is getting sick, he, as a rule, begins to feel negative changes in his body in advance. In this case, a child who does not eat anything simply "turns on" the defense mechanism - on an empty stomach it is easier for the immune system to fight the pathogen. Do not force feed the baby, he does everything right, as his natural instincts tell him. But this is true only for acute infections. If a child has a long-term chronic illness, lack of appetite is a bad symptom, but this is rare.

  The child's body easily gets used to new conditions for itself, and therefore the baby, with a protracted illness, begins to eat, as usual, and with some ailments, for example, with diabetes even increased appetite. Komarovsky gives certain recommendations on how to feed a sick child: no way, until he asks. And mother should not be ashamed at all that she does not feed her sick child. This is the best thing she can do now for his speedy recovery.

• Refusal to eat "out of conscience." This happens with teenage children, especially with girls. If she suddenly decides that she has become "fat" and needs to "do something about it urgently", offer the child lighter and healthy foods(salads, boiled meat, fruits, milk). If a girl refuses to eat this too, then fasting becomes pathological and is quite comparable to a symptom of a mental illness that leads to anorexia and the girl's slow death or disability. In this situation, feeding by force is also not an option, says Komarovsky, since the real cause of the hunger strike must be eliminated. A psychiatrist and an adolescent psychologist or psychotherapist will help with this.

• Refusal to eat for no reason. There are also children who, without any illness, eat little or practically do not want to eat. They, according to Komarovsky, still have their own reasons for not wanting to eat, such as, individual characteristics metabolism. Indeed, in one child, digestion is faster, nutrients are absorbed and absorbed faster, while in others the process is slower. Therefore, such a "slow" child refuses to cook lunch, because he still has breakfast in the process of processing.

Appetite depends on the level of hormones.

If a child grows faster (his mom and dad are tall), that is, he will be bigger and more often than his peer, who genetically “does not shine” with high growth.

The level of energy consumption also affects the presence of appetite. If the child runs and jumps on fresh air, then it will get hungry faster than if it sits in front of the TV and watches cartoons.

To restore the child's appetite, it is enough to simply adjust the energy consumption.- walk more, enroll your child in the sports section. In the end, the whole family going for evening walks before dinner will definitely give a positive result.

Parental Mistakes

Very often, parents try to treat a non-existent disease. If no serious acute pathologies and infections are found in the child, it can be difficult for parents to admit that the child does not eat because he is not brought up that way. And the testing begins, and there are always diagnoses that “as if they don’t exist” and their treatment is a waste of time and money.

Komarovsky advises to stop dragging the child around clinics and laboratories, leave him alone and simply change the daily routine and lifestyle - introduce longer walks, cool baths, and go in for sports.

Many parents force their child to eat by force.

Yevgeny Komarovsky also refers to these actions his favorite cunning tricks: “Look, the spoon flew, flew”, “Eat, otherwise we won’t go to the park!”, “I’ll tell dad everything!”. A cornered baby under pressure will eat, but without an appetite. And this means that less gastric juice will be allocated, the liver will cope with its part of the work more slowly, digestion will be more difficult. The benefits of force feeding outweigh the harm.

It is also wrong to give food not according to age. If a child does not eat in pieces a year, demanding pureed food, this may be fully justified. If he has only 2 teeth in his mouth, then there is simply nothing to chew on the pieces. However, mothers who have read that the pieces will certainly stimulate the rest of the teeth to grow faster immediately sound the alarm: they say, the appetite has disappeared. Komarovsky calls for a realistic assessment of the capabilities of his child. No one asks to wipe his food up to 5-7 years, but to make it digestible, at least until 6-8 teeth come out, is quite within the power of any parent.

If a child refuses soup for lunch, do not rush him to cook something else. It's also not worth the hassle. Let it work up an appetite. The only thing that can defeat selective appetite is the feeling of hunger. When it becomes real, strong, the poured soup will cause a lot of enthusiasm and will be quickly eaten without any persuasion. The main thing is to offer the child the same soup at the next meal, and not another dish.

A child who suffers from a lack of appetite should not have any snacks between main meals: no apples, no oranges, no sweets.

Such "easy prey" should not be in his reach. This rule must be observed by all family members, it will be especially difficult for grandparents, but we must hold on.

You should not impose your meal schedule on your baby - breakfast, lunch and dinner may not coincide with his regimen. Try not to offer him food at all for at least a day. At the same time, walk, play in the air, but do not say a word about food. The child himself will ask to eat, and will eat everything that you offer him, with excellent appetite.

You will learn more about what to do if the child does not want to eat in the following video.

• Doctor Komarovsky

9 month old baby is not eating well! What to do?

From 4.5 months she began to introduce complementary foods, ate everything that I offer, but for several days she has been categorically refusing meat purees, eating only sweet curds and sweet fruit purees !!! He learned to spit and uses it perfectly. I breastfeed. In the morning, usually porridge, juice, bread; at lunch, vegetable puree, meat puree and juice; at 6 pm fr mashed potatoes, cottage cheese, at 8 o'clock before bathing yogurt ... Who faced such a problem, how to make a child eat not tasty))) ???

My daughter, up to 9 months old (and now we are almost a year old), ate everything and with enormous pleasure - both milk formula (we are artificial from 1.5 months old), and complementary foods - any juices from 4.5 months old, whatever porridge not given, vegetable puree, meat. With special pleasure, the truth - cottage cheese and fruit purees (sweet, after all!) Well, and then the whims began - the first thing I threw away the bottle with the mixture, tried to give from a spoon, also into none - then I let it out with a trickle from my mouth, it turned out to "deceive" for a couple of weeks her, making a liquid porridge on the mixture and giving it from a bottle at night. Then that stopped working too. I had to give up the mixture for 1.5 months. back (although the district pediatrician had Round eyes- feed up to a year! try other mixes (and we ate NAS)! yeah! so I went to sweep everything off the store shelves!) Now in the morning and in the evening we always have milk porridge from a spoon, sometimes I add either fruit puree or a grated apple for taste, my daughter bursts on both cheeks.

As for the "savory meals" - this is lunch, then here, too, the child began to show miracles of legibility - he tries the first spoon, and then, if something did not suit the taste, starts knocking the spoon out of my hands with his hands ... At first, oh and I got tired ... Then I adapted to simply distract: we sit next to toys (bears, dolls) and begin to feed in turn - a spoon for a bear, a spoon for Katya ... My daughter opens her mouth by inertia and the process goes on. Sometimes she has to occupy her hands with something so that she doesn’t push the spoon - for example, I give my spoon or napkin to wipe my mouth ... Well, we haven’t encountered spitting yet (pah-pah) ...

Yes ... I also wanted to say ... Ready-made unsweetened mashed potatoes in jars are still tasteless ... I definitely try to cook dinners for the baby myself - I cook vegetable and meat soups, mashed potatoes ... I add a little during the cooking process. .. Maybe it saves ... I don’t think that, say, store-bought "broccoli" or "cauliflower" my princess would now burst with a bang behind her ears ...

Anyuta, cook your own chicken, beef ... in a blender with potatoes or rice ... you can even give small heaps (chickens), but this is if you already teach to chew ... We, too, purchase meat purees are not very good, but only cooked it bursts only behind the cheeks, cracking ... We are 1.2 broml with food pah, pah, pah no ... The only thing he didn’t eat anything for his teeth ...