After 12 months, do you breastfeed before or after solid food? How do you transition from breastfeeding to food? What happens if your child prefers breastmilk?

How and when do you make the transition from breastfeeding to complementary feeding and introducing solids? You can start including solid food in your child’s diet from 6 months of a baby’s life or whenever your child is ready. These foods complement breastmilk, which is why they are known as complementary feeding, so the breast or bottle should be offered first and only afterward solid food.

During their first year of life, the most important food for all babies is milk, and that’s why it comes first. But what happens after the first year of life? How does baby feeding work from that point onward? Do you need to make any changes?

A baby’s nutrition from 12 months onwards

There is nothing special to do apart from celebrating your baby’s 1st birthday and your 12 months of breastfeeding together. Feeding your baby remains exactly the same.

Just as babies gradually learn to walk and gradually stop crawling, they transition to solid foods. This is a process that will happen on its own, and you won’t need to pay special attention to it.

We cannot expect that the day after they turn one year old, everything suddenly changes and then gives more importance to solid food than milk. First, remember that they are relying on milk for the first two years of their lives, so milk (whichever one) is still very important in their diet.

As they grow, children will naturally show more and more interest in food, but keep in mind that there are times when they will stop growing and will eat less. However, it is important not to force them to eat and set an example by eating together with them.

What if my child doesn’t want to eat?

Sometimes, they almost do not want to eat anything in the beginning, and solid food goes everywhere but into their mouth. Your child keeps asking you for milk while they eat or don’t want to eat at all and only asks for milk. This usually makes parents feel a bit overwhelmed or even worry that what they are not doing might not be right.

And then there is the social pressure that happens in this situation, and you might get comments from your family, friends, and everyone else: “You are spoiling your child; if you don’t stop breastfeeding, your child will never eat, of course, your child won’t eat if she knows that she can have breastmilk” and so on. And these comments can be even stronger if your child has meals away from home when you are not with them. But the fact is, when the mother is not there when there is no possibility to breastfeed, then they do eat more solid food, which can encourage the other adult’s opinion. You may therefore think that you need to get your child to eat more solids or that something needs to change, but nothing could be further from the truth.

When you are not with your child, it is normal that they want to eat more because there is no milk, so they will have to eat something else! But human milk is the most complete food they can possibly eat, also at this age, and all little ones know that.

So keep calm, don’t worry, and relax; this is a gradual process that will last a year, maybe even a little longer, and like everything in parenting, it requires time and a lot of patience.