Rapley Weaning .com

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• Our Books
• Baby-led Weaning DVDs
• Leaflet on BLW
• BLW Guidelines
• Other Publications
• Gill's Biography
• Useful BLW Links
• Contact

Welcome!

I'm so pleased you've found this website. It's intended as a focal point for queries - to lead you to where you can learn more - rather than as a place to find out everything you ever wanted to know about parenting and BLW, but our books are a great place to start! The latest, available from July 2014, is Baby-led Parenting, a practical guide to understanding your baby and being the parent he or she really needs. Baby-led Breastfeeding will help you understand how breastfeeding works and how to get it to work for you, while the best place to get information about BLW is from the original BLW book (as well as from the forums and blogs written by parents who are doing it). And of course, there's the BLW Cookbook, too.

Meanwhile, the buttons on the left will take you to:

• Information on all our books
• Information about three useful DVDs on BLW (which are now also available as mobile apps)
• A simple 'how to' leaflet, which you are welcome to download, print and share
• Basic BLW guidelines, with a brief explanation of the rationale behind them
• Details of the textbook in which there is a chapter about BLW
• A bit of background about me
• Links to just a few of the many websites and blogs about BLW
• The email address for this site

Exciting news! A paper in the BMJ Open journal by Sonya Cameron and colleagues in New Zealand shows (no real surprise) that health professionals' knowledge about BLW differs from what parents who have done it know - that it's easier and less stressful than the conventional approach to introducing solid foods. Interestingly, the researchers found that raw apple stands out as a food that is sometimes difficult for babies to manage easily, so it may be that crisp apples are best left until babies have got the hang of what they're doing. The study, Healthcare professionals' and mothers' knowledge of, attitudes to and experiences with, Baby-Led Weaning: a content analysis study, can be found here: BMJ Open

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