Starting Solid Foods: A Beginner's Guide to Baby's First Foods

Signs your baby is ready

Readiness is a developmental milestone, not a date on the calendar, though it usually lands around 6 months for most babies. Look for a cluster of signs together, not just one: your baby can sit upright with support and hold their head steady, has lost the tongue-thrust reflex that pushes food back out of the mouth, and shows real interest in what's on your plate — leaning in, opening their mouth, reaching. A baby who watches you eat but turns away or clamps their mouth shut when a spoon comes close usually isn't ready yet, even if they've hit 6 months.

Purees, baby-led weaning, or both

There's more than one reasonable way to start, and plenty of families mix approaches rather than picking one and sticking to it rigidly.

• Traditional purees: smooth, spoon-fed foods that thicken gradually as your baby gets used to texture. Easier to control portion and mess early on, and a common starting point.
• Baby-led weaning: skipping purees and offering soft, appropriately sized whole foods your baby picks up and feeds themselves from the start. Proponents point to more self-regulated eating and fewer picky-eating struggles later, though the research comparing outcomes long-term is still limited.
• Combination: many parents offer purees for iron-rich staples like fortified cereal or meat, and soft finger foods (avocado, steamed sweet potato spears) alongside them. There's no rule requiring you to pick a single method.

For a deeper look at the mess, cost, and gagging-versus-choking questions that actually separate these two approaches, our full comparison of baby-led weaning and purees breaks down the decision in more detail than fits here.

What to offer first

Iron matters more early on than most first-foods advice mentions. A baby's iron stores built up before birth start declining around 6 months, which is a big part of why pediatric guidance points toward iron-rich foods as a priority, not just "whatever's soft."

• Iron-fortified infant cereal (oat or multigrain, mixed with breast milk or formula to a thin consistency at first)
• Pureed or well-cooked, shredded meat or poultry
• Mashed or pureed beans and lentils
• Mashed avocado, banana, or sweet potato
• Soft-cooked, cut vegetables like carrot or squash (pureed or in safe finger-food shapes, depending on your approach)

Introducing common allergens

Guidance on this has changed meaningfully over the past decade. Older advice leaned toward delaying common allergens like peanut, egg, tree nuts, and shellfish. Current guidance from pediatric and allergy organizations instead favors introducing these foods early and deliberately, in age-appropriate forms (like thinned peanut butter or well-cooked egg, never whole nuts), because delaying introduction hasn't been shown to prevent allergy and, for peanut specifically, earlier introduction is linked to lower allergy rates in large studies.

The shift traces back largely to a landmark randomized trial (the LEAP study) that compared infants who avoided peanut with infants who were fed peanut regularly starting in infancy, and found a substantially lower rate of peanut allergy in the group that started early. That result is a big part of why NIAID's current guidelines split babies into risk categories — including babies with severe eczema or an egg allergy, who are considered higher-risk and may need allergy testing before starting peanut at home.

Choking hazards to skip or modify

How much and how often

Start small: a teaspoon or two, once a day, is plenty at first — this is about practicing the skill of eating, not replacing milk feeds. Breast milk or formula stays the main source of calories and nutrition through the first year even as solids ramp up to two or three meals a day by 8–9 months. Let your baby's cues (turning away, closing their mouth, losing interest) end the meal rather than pushing for a specific amount; appetite varies a lot day to day. If you're bottle-feeding any of those milk feeds, our comparison of baby bottles has more on matching nipple flow to how your baby actually feeds.

Once your baby's eating solids regularly and sitting up well on their own, a high chair with a wipeable tray makes mealtime cleanup dramatically easier — our comparison of high chairs covers slim, convertible, and portable-booster options depending on your kitchen space. Once teeth start coming in around this stage, it's worth keeping an eye on drooling and gum tenderness that can affect how much they want to eat at a given meal.

Readiness and enthusiasm at 6 months don't always last — plenty of great eaters at this stage turn cautious again around age 2 or 3. If that happens, our guide to handling picky eating in toddlers covers the feeding approach with the most evidence behind it, and when pickiness is normal versus worth a pediatrician visit.

Solids are only part of the feeding picture in the first year — if you're still weighing breast milk against formula, or how to combine the two before this stage, our guide to breastfeeding vs. formula feeding covers the practical trade-offs.