From my own personal experience there is no thing such as a window of
opportunity. Babies take solids as and when they want/need to. I have had
some mothers and babies dyads where the babies only really are well onto
solids by 12 months odd. All of these babies have been well, normal and not
underweight. From my experience the most important thing is to reasure the
mother. (and keep brestfeeding).

I think we also need to differentiate between taste aversions and texture
aversions. In the few true texture aversions I have seen this is what
occurred: No pattern of breastfeeding problems but slightly late or average
time to introduction of solids but the infant would take solids providing
they were smoothly pureed. They often had more of a problem with the spoon
in their mouth than anything else. The infants/toddlers were still eating
pureed food at 2 years and beyond (rejected lumpy food). However, as soon
as they got bigger they preferred to feed themselves and went for things
that would melt in the mouth (often refined, processed food, not too much
chewing) and only liked a limited range of tastes and textures.

Two of these children I have kept contact with (they are now early teens)
both ended up having motor/neurological/learning difficulties problems and
were diagnosed as ADD. Probably very accurately too.  I must add there were
other early signs of a problem in these children: behavioural issues and
the like. I remember the one little boy used to scream/struggle as soon as
his mother lay him down to do a nappy change and from the time he could
walk she had to do the nappy with him standing.


Kind Regards

Mandy O'Reilly
IBCLC

             ***********************************************
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