When to Give up Baby Cereal

My daughter is also 9 months. She eats the baby cereal still, also with fruit mixed in but that is mainly because I still have some. Once this is gone, I do not plan on buying more. She also eats Cheerios-loves the multigrain-after I let it soften just a bit in milk. I drain the milk before giving it to her. She had regular oatmeal with my husband the other day. Just caught him before he added honey. No Honey for babies. Farina would be a good cereal as well. That is what my mom used to give my nieces and nephews sweetened with a little applesauce. The only time my daughter gets cereal at night is when she does not seem to want the other foods. When we went to her 9 month doc checkup, the doc wasn't really concerned about making sure she ate the cereal. I told her she sometimes ate Cheerios and sometimes the baby cereal and she was fine with it. She was really just concerned that I was introducing different foods and that my daughter was getting enough variety and balanced foods.

It is amazing to hear the different schools of thoughts with different docs, my doc praised my thinking outside the box and gave my daughter an avocado as a first food, it is high in good fat for their brain and is easy to digest. My daughter hated rice cereal and does to this day (she is 17m)There are other cereals to try as well besides oatmeal...cream of buckwheat is excellent, more nutritional value, easier to digest than oats and I make mine with coconut milk for the fat and nutritional value coconut has (coconut milk is non-allergenic too). You can mix the avocado with the rice cereal for a little something different.

Yes, baby food is a supplement, the majority of their nutrition should come from either formula or breastmilk.

J. W. MPH
Wellness Edcuator/Lifestyle and Wellness Coach

As someone else said, cereal is not beneficial to a baby at all. It's basically filler to learn how to eat. That being said, I didn't give my son cereal at all and he's just fine. You can just give whatever it is you are eating and he'll do great.

Baby cereal does not really add any nutritional value to the baby's diet- it had added iron and that's it. It's usually used as a first food because it is easy to digest and unlikely to cause allergic reactions. There's no reason to continue it.

Our pediatrician makes quite a big deal out of my son having cereal included in his diet. I don't know for how long but my son is 8 months right now and doesn't care for it but I push it because the two doctors we have seen both insisted on it.

But, I like what the other poster wrote - serve it til you run out. :)

I stopped the baby cereal when I finally ran out of it *laugh*.

In my opinion (and, what do I know at times...) baby cereal is good for learning how to eat. If he is moving on to other foods and doing fine, then I would think it is okay to graduate to stage 1 or 2.

Quite honestly, I don't think you can go wrong here at all. Sounds like he's progressing nicely with the eating.