Brenda writes: I work as the Breastfeeding Coordiantor in a WIC office, and here in my town we are seeing an unusual amount of failure to thrive in older babies. According to one pediatrician I spoke to this weekend, many of them are breastfed older babies (the pediatrician is a lactation consultant). I may be helping her with some of these cases, and am wondering if any of the LCs and/or dieticians have experience dealing with these clients. The cases where older babies (i.e. babies over 5-6 months of age, and often over 1 year old) refuse to eat solids and only want to nurse constantly. These are cases where the infants are "falling off" the growth charts. Hi Brenda! 2 things you might want to consider immediately came to mind - 1) I can't prove it (since we can't seem to get those Breastfed Growth Charts) but in my 9 years as a LLL Leader, I've seen that a downward trend in the growth charts is very common in the second half of the first year. My own 3 babies all dropped from over 90% at 6 months to around 40-50% at one year. It is also very common for babies not to eat any substantial amount of other foods for 9 months to a year rather than 6 months, and my personal guess is that the healthy age to start solids may be older than we currently think - I'm not sure what the six month guideline is based upon. My personal experience, again, of when my children really ate (as opposed to tasting for fun) was 12 months, 6 months and 11 months. Not to say that some babies aren't really in trouble, but that FTT may be overdiagnosed. I believe there has been at least 1 study of older babies not on solids - does anyone know more? 2) The other possible piece of the puzzle that springs to mind (especially when you say 'unusual number') is the possibility that scheduled, rather than on-demand, feedings may cause insufficient supply not in the first weeks but in the later months. A recent article in Breastfeeding Abstracts discussed the physiological process involved. ('Cue Feeding: Wisdom and Science', Lisa Marasco & Jan Barger, May 1999). Hope this helps, Marcia McCoy gotta go now and grout my tub enclosure *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html