How to Choose Baby Tableware?

In the process of raising a baby, learning to eat on your own is a milestone in your baby's growth, but mothers and fathers who have brought up their children know that giving your child a meal is a "big job". As the Chinese saying goes, the child is father of the man. A person needs to develop good habits from an early age, and good habits can last a lifetime. Raising a baby to eat on his own should also start at a young age. Parents should consciously use their baby's sensory and cognitive, behavioral and motor development to gradually train and develop their baby's ability to eat on their own.

When babies start to eat on their own, it means that they have moved from the "feeding" stage to the independent eating stage, gradually accepting diversified foods on the basis of which they start to learn to eat independently.

The key period for feeding baby supplementary food

At around 6 months, babies will gradually grasp food with their hands consciously, mothers and fathers should give full recognition and encouragement to this behavior, so that babies can learn the shape of food as soon as possible, thus increasing their interest in eating. You can also use complementary food cutters and prepare more chunks of food for your baby that are suitable for grasping, such as fruit pieces, potato sticks, bread slices, etc. Around 10-12 months, some babies will start to imitate adults and try to eat with a spoon. However, due to the lack of skill proficiency, babies often spill the bowl or feed the rice to their faces.

At this time, you need to start cultivating good dining habits, it is best to use special dining chairs for babies, complementary food from the table to add, and establish rules: on the dining table and chairs on eating, off the dining table and chairs can no longer eat.

In order to facilitate the baby's practice, parents can choose a healthy and safe children's dinner plate for the baby, as well as rounded edges, easy to grasp the children's fork and spoon, so that the baby can more easily send rice into the mouth. As long as the success of a few times in a row, the baby will be full of a sense of accomplishment and motivation for the matter of eating, and from then on love to eat actively!

The benefits of choosing the right baby tableware

1、Increase the interest in dining
Exquisite cartoon shape, bright colors, will directly stimulate the baby's visual organs, to attract the baby's attention, driven by the strong curiosity, the baby may take the initiative to ask their own hands to eat. 2、Cultivate hands-on ability
After the baby is 1 year old will begin to learn to use tableware, special tableware is conducive to the development of baby's hands, to promote the flexible movement of the fingers, in order to exercise hand, eye and mouth coordination.

3、Cultivate good living habits
The use of tableware sets designed for babies, babies will have the initiative to clean tableware and according to the shape of the object back into the lunch box, which is very helpful to develop good habits of hygiene and discipline.

At around 1 year old, you can start teaching your baby how to use cutlery. Parents need to put the food in the spoon and hand it to the baby, so that the baby can send the food into the mouth by himself. After establishing such awareness, you must let go of the baby to try on their own, do not look anxious to "help", in the whole process to use short words to tell the baby action, such as: "fork", "eat ", but to avoid the chatter of complex expressions that interfere with the baby's concentration, and to give encouragement after the baby successfully eat on their own.

Choosing baby tableware is a discipline

Tableware is something that children use to eat every day, and if something goes wrong, it's similar to "feeding poison" to your baby every day.

As we all know, children's tableware in the choice has basically no longer used glass. Although glass is stable, non-toxic and safer, easy to clean and resistant to wear and tear, but even heat-resistant reinforced glass, the weight is really not suitable for children to hold and put, has been gradually replaced by non-breakable and lightweight plastic, plant fiber, stainless steel and silicone.

First to introduce you to a few important concepts.

• BPA: BPA is bisphenol A, some plastics will be released during the heating process, precipitated into the food may disrupt human metabolism and have an impact on children's development and immunity.
• Phthalates: Plasticizers are used in the production of plastic, which is harmful to human health.
• Melamine: resin tableware, also known as imitation porcelain tableware, is synthesized from melamine and formaldehyde as raw materials. Theoretically, 100% melamine resin is non-toxic and can be used safely. But the premise is that the use of the temperature is not too high! The U.S. FDA has done experiments, when highly acidic food at a higher temperature (70 degrees) placed in the case of silicone tableware for more than two hours, melamine and formaldehyde can be detected.

Silicone is not plastic, but rubber, can withstand temperatures of more than 250 degrees, drop-resistant, waterproof, non-stick, and not easy to chemical reaction with external substances, and now the raw materials for baby products are basically silicone products. Food-grade silicone baby tableware does not contain BPA, phthalates and dense amines. Baby's first spoon is generally food-grade silicone soft-headed spoon, soft texture, will not hurt the baby's delicate gums, and good elasticity is not easy to deformation, can be resistant to baby chewing, material safety, boiling sterilization will not have harmful substances leaked. When selecting silicone tableware for your baby, be sure to keep your eyes peeled and choose qualified products with safety certifications, such as those approved by LFGB in Germany and FDA in the United States.

Necessary feeding tableware for babies

1. Spoon

Choose a spoon with the right size belly, depth and handle.

Baby a mouth size is more appropriate. Too big baby's mouth is difficult to accommodate, too small a bite can not eat much, affecting efficiency and consuming the baby's patience. Not too deep, otherwise it is difficult for the baby to eat the innermost food, the next scoop spoon is also more likely to spill. Too shallow food can easily fall off, which may also lead to frustration and lack of patience and confidence to continue trying.

The shape and length of the spoon handle can be chosen according to your baby's situation. Generally speaking, a spoon handle with a certain curvature will be more convenient for the baby to grasp.

As for whether to bend the head, it is not necessary. If the baby does not use the curved head very smoothly, it is perfectly fine to use a normal spoon.

2. Fork

Fork is suitable for eating some solid food with shape and long food such as noodles.

At the beginning of the baby's movement stability, precision is not so high, you can choose fork food parts with serrated fork, food is more difficult to fall, increasing the chances of success.
3. Bowl

You can choose a stronger suction bowl, a certain depth of the bowl. Not only can make it more convenient for the baby to scoop the food, but also to avoid the baby scoop to the food after picking the fly out, there is a bowl edge is better.

4. Bib
When you first start using a fork and spoon, you can imagine the chaotic scenes and the headache of cleaning. We can also do some preparation work. When the weather gets cooler, it's still a lot of work to do one load of laundry, so you can put a silicone bib on your baby and and use silicone placemats.

How to train your baby to use tableware

First is the way, generally speaking, the use of tableware is divided into two steps: scoop (fork) to take food, send into the mouth. Some babies are not very skilled in the first step at first, we can use the dismantling action and try from the second step for the baby.

Prepare two spoons, one of them to scoop the right food, then hand the spoon to the baby and let him/her put it into the mouth. When the baby has finished eating, take the empty spoon back from the baby and pass the other spoon with the food in it.

If your baby can master both steps to some degree, it is even easier to just give him/her a suction cup bowl with a small amount of food and a suitable spoon or fork and let him/her learn on his/her own.

Parental encouragement

This is probably the most important point, to allow the baby to use it in a way that we do not envisage as conventional and to allow the baby to fail.

For example, some banging, scooping half and missing half, and other behaviors are relatively normal in the early stages. As long as it is not particularly frequent, there is no need to rush to correct, blame, criticize the baby, if indeed do not know how to interact, then give the baby to try on their own, appropriate encouragement to give confidence can be.

Any ability to learn, progress requires a process, we adults themselves learning new things are also stumbling, the heart is full of curiosity and nervousness. In contrast, the baby has belonged to the speed of learning skills open level, with time to guard this new skills to improve it.