Medical disclaimer. This article is general information and does not replace advice from your paediatrician, GP or health visitor. Babies born early, babies with reflux, allergies or medical feeding needs, and babies who are not growing as expected all need individual guidance. Ask your provider before you start.
The short answer on when to start solids: around 6 months. That is where the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the NHS all land. But six months is a window, not an alarm clock. What actually decides the week you begin is whether your baby can sit, aim and swallow — three physical skills that arrive on their own schedule. This guide covers those readiness signs, what to put on the spoon first, how allergen introduction works now, and why milk still does most of the feeding for months after the first taste of sweet potato.
Why around six months
WHO recommends babies are fed only breast milk for the first six months, then "start at 6 months with small amounts of food and increase gradually as the child gets older." Its 2023 complementary feeding guideline frames it in terms of need rather than age: complementary feeding is "the process of providing foods in addition to milk when breast milk or milk formula alone are no longer adequate to meet nutritional requirements," and that generally begins at 6 months.
The AAP recommends only breast milk for approximately six months, with solids introduced around six months alongside continued breastfeeding. The NHS says the same: introducing solid foods "should start when your baby is around 6 months old."
Four months is not a target, and none of the three recommends it as a start age. The AAP mentions four months only as the early edge of a window — a rough size marker (doubled birth weight, typically about 4 months and 13 pounds or more) and the "4 to 6 months" framing in its allergen advice.
The readiness signs that actually count
The NHS lists three signs, and the important part is that they show up together:
- Your baby can stay in a sitting position and hold their head steady.
- They can coordinate their eyes, hands and mouth — look at food, pick it up and put it in their mouth.
- They can swallow food rather than spitting it straight back out.
The AAP describes the same picture from a slightly different angle. Good head control in a high chair or feeding seat. Interest in what everyone else is eating, and reaching for it. The ability to move food from a spoon to the back of the throat instead of pushing it out with the tongue. And roughly doubled birth weight — typically around four months and about 13 pounds — as a rough size marker.
Practically: sit your baby in a high chair with a loaded spoon and watch. If their head bobs, or the food comes straight back out on the tongue, that is a "not yet" — and not yet is fine.
Signs that are not readiness signs
This is where most families get pushed into starting early. The NHS names three behaviours that look like hunger for solids and are not:
- Chewing their fists. Normal. Babies explore with their mouths.
- Waking in the night more than usual. Sleep regressions, growth spurts and teething all do this. Cereal in a bottle is not the fix.
- Wanting extra milk feeds. Also normal, especially during a growth spurt.
If a well-meaning relative says the baby is "ready" based on any of those three, the answer is that the baby is being a baby.
First foods: keep them boring on purpose
The AAP's guidance is to keep foods "soft or pureed to prevent choking," and to introduce one single-ingredient new food every 3 to 5 days. Single-ingredient matters: if something disagrees with your baby, you want one suspect, not five.
The NHS suggests starting with single vegetables and fruits — mashed, or soft cooked sticks of parsnip, broccoli, potato, yam, sweet potato, carrot, apple or pear. Sticks work if you are doing baby-led weaning; the same vegetable mashed works if you are spoon-feeding. Both are fine, and most families end up doing some of each.
Amounts start absurdly small. The NHS says to offer "just a few pieces, or teaspoons of food"; the AAP says to start with "half a spoonful or less" and increase gradually. You are teaching a skill, not replacing a meal.
Two hard rules from the NHS: do not add salt or sugar — including stock cubes and gravy — and remove hard pips and stones from fruit and bones from fish or meat.
Allergens: earlier and one at a time
The old advice to delay peanut, egg and fish has been reversed. The AAP states plainly that "there is no evidence that waiting to introduce baby-safe (soft) foods, such as eggs, dairy, soy, peanut products or fish, beyond 4 to 6 months of age prevents food allergy." The NHS goes further, noting that evidence has shown delaying peanut and hen's egg beyond 6 to 12 months may increase the risk of an allergy to those foods.
The method is what matters. Introduce allergenic foods one at a time, from around six months, so you can spot a reaction and know what caused it. The NHS's list of foods that can trigger a reaction has twelve entries: eggs; nuts and peanuts; cows' milk; foods containing gluten, including wheat, barley and rye; beans, lentils and peas; seeds, sesame especially; soya; shellfish; fish; celery; mustard; and sulphur dioxide.
One exception to "just get on with it": if your baby already has eczema or a diagnosed food allergy, or there is a family history of food allergy, eczema, asthma or hay fever, the NHS says to talk to your GP or health visitor before you start. That conversation is quick and worth having.
Whole nuts are on the NHS's avoid-list for choking, so the food goes in another way: the NHS says to serve nuts and peanuts finely ground or as nut butters, and seeds finely ground.
Milk is still the main meal
This is the part that surprises people. Starting solids does not mean tapering milk. WHO is specific: breast milk "can provide half or more of a child's energy needs between the ages of 6 and 12 months, and one third of energy needs between 12 and 24 months." The AAP puts it the same way — early on, your baby is still getting most of their nutrition from breast milk, formula or both.
So for the first months of solids, food is practice. Milk is nutrition. Feeds do not need to shrink to make room, and a day where your baby refuses the spoon entirely is not a day they went hungry.
Gagging is not choking
Every parent starting solids should know the difference, because gagging is loud, alarming and normal.
The NHS describes gagging as part of learning to deal with solid food: your baby's eyes may water, they might push their tongue forward, and they might retch to bring the food forward in their mouth. It is a protective reflex doing its job. Choking, the NHS says, is different — which is why the rule below is not negotiable.
The safety rules are short:
- Always stay with your baby while they eat, in case they start to choke.
- Avoid hard foods like whole nuts, raw carrot or raw apple.
- Quarter small round foods — the NHS says to cut small, round foods like grapes and cherry tomatoes into quarters.
- Sit your baby upright, and cool and test hot food before it goes near them.
What is worth writing down
One-at-a-time allergen introduction only works if you can look backwards. When something shows up as a rash or an unsettled night, the useful question is "what did they eat, and when?" — and three days later nobody remembers.
Worth logging: the food, the date, and anything unusual afterwards. Not worth logging: grams eaten. Keep it light enough that you actually do it, and keep solids separate from milk feeds so your feeding intervals still describe milk.
How ProbaBaby helps
ProbaBaby's baby tracking module treats a solid meal as its own kind of entry. A Solids button sits in the tracker dock — row three becomes Bottle · Solids · Sleep once it is switched on — and tapping it logs the meal instantly, with no timer to start or stop, the same way a diaper is logged. The Track tab then carries a By Type breakdown; feeding is recorded in six types in all — breast, bottle, pumped, formula, solid and mixed. Solids are deliberately never counted as milk: a puree does not reset "Last fed", does not re-arm the feeding reminder, and stays out of the average feeding interval and the average feeding duration — though it still counts in the feed total and in the By Type breakdown. When the button appears is a setting you control: the default is five months, adjustable between four and eight, and clamped so no setting can put it below four months. It reads corrected age, so a baby born early is not prompted at five chronological months, and the start date is stored per baby and server-synced, so twins can begin at different times and both parents' devices agree — family sharing records every entry against whoever logged it. The button showing up is not the app telling you to start; that call belongs to your paediatrician.
The same day also renders as a 24-hour clock — feeds, sleep, diapers and awake time as rings over a day-to-night scene — on the Lock Screen widget and on Apple Watch.