Quote:
Originally Posted by Gramma
Oh pish. I always did that stuff and my kids are just fine. Sometimes I think people go to extremes protecting their children to the point of basically making stuff up to worry about. Baby cereal was made for babies. It's perfectly safe.
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Sorry but breast milk was made for babies, anything else is manufactured and made by people who cannot properly copy what a baby needs.
A baby's gut simply isn't ready to digest other things than breast milk before six months (and maybe even older). Their gut is leaky, it lets through substances into the blood that the body can then become sensitized to.
This is how allergies start. Now before you say "well I was fed cereal at two months and I am fine", that's great. But not all are fine. I am not fine. I was fed cereal at two months and have many allergies, asthma, eczema, other problems. And wouldn't you feel guilty if it's your kid who has problems because you wanted to force them to sleep better against what their body needs?
There is a reason babies wake up a lot, not limited to nutritional needs. There are studies that have linked heavier sleeping (such as that caused by feeding cereal to make them sleep better)to SIDS. Babies need to wake often because they don't have the ability to move themselves out of danger for instance.
I could go on forever about this. There are things that were done 50 years ago that were thought to be ok-but we learned better as science advanced. 50 years ago we didn't use car seats for kids. Was that better? Of course it wasn't. We painted our house with lead filled paint-all because it lasted better than none lead paint.
In fact that is a wonderful comparison to cereal-we used lead paint because it was convenient for us-it cut down on the work we had to do. But then we found out that it was hurting us and our kids-it was poisoning them. Cereal is given also to cut down our work-it's not for the benefit of the kid, it is for the benefit of the parent, and equally we have found out that it is not good for them.
We learn, we move on. Should we keep making the same mistakes just because people before us did?