Feeding your baby can be a challenge from breast feeding, formula feeding, to transitioning to solids and establishing healthy feeding habits early on. If you’ve ever been puzzled by feeding your baby, join us for an evening of learning! Carolina Pediatric Therapy is holding our next FREE Parent Education Night On Tuesday, October 23 from 6-7pm. To learn about what will be covered, listen to this 3 minute podcast interview with our Founder and CEO, Summer McMurry, as she and Andra Sylvanus, our Registered Dietician discuss Infant Feeding. (Listen on Apple iTunes & Google Play).
Summer McMurry:
Hello, this is Summer McMurry. I’m the founder and CEO of Carolina Pediatric Therapy, and today, I am here with Andra Sylvanus, our registered dietician here at Carolina Peds. Good afternoon.
Andra Sylvanus:
Hi, good to be back.
Summer McMurry:
I’m glad to have you here today, because we’re talking about a really fun topic today. We’re talking about infant feeding. We have a new class that’s coming up. Do you want to tell us about that a little bit?
Andra Sylvanus:
Yes. We have a Parent Education Night coming up on Tuesday, the 23rd, in the evening. We have it set up free for parents in the community to come and learn about infant feeding. It starts at birth and goes through almost toddler, maybe about a year old? Teach you all about different options for feeding, when to start feeding solids, what kind of foods are best to start at solids, what developmental stages for swallowing; what to look out for. With infants, you’ve got your main choices of breastfeeding versus formula feeding, and then after that, it’s mostly up to your baby.
So it’s just kind of learning how to respond to their cues on when they’re hungry, when full, when to move on to something else. Pretty simple. It’s simple but not simple for the infants. Then starting as maybe as young as four months, we start to look at when to introduce solid foods. Those are kind of the older baby ages. When is the best time for your child to start solid foods? And what’s the best food to start with? See how that goes.
Summer McMurry:
Okay. I was looking through the material when we were talking a little bit about infant formula. Are you going to go over some of that as well? It gets really confusing. I’ve been to Target when we go to the grocery store, we’re looking at a gazillion different choices there for families, and that can be a little confusing for new moms.
Andra Sylvanus:
Yeah. There are a lot of different choices in formulas. I have a nice handout that goes through the different types of formulas, both from the standard companies and also, we have the newer, quote, “natural formulas” that you’ll see in some grocery stores, so we can talk about the different options there if you’re going with formula.
Summer McMurry:
Okay. And then we also have Katherine [Wrightarmor 00:02:04], who is going to be joining you as well, and she’s going to be talking a little bit about feeding development and just the process of development in those feeding skills, and those oral motor skills, right?
Andra Sylvanus:
Yeah, Catherine is our lead feeding therapist, as a speech therapist. She’s going to go over the developmental stages for the swallowing ability, and she’s bringing lots of fun tools. You can try out different spoons, she has cups and straws, and just different things that are great for kids to use to learn the skills they need.
Summer McMurry:
Okay. Well, great. We look forward to having the class here. This is open to anyone in the community, you do not have to be a patient of Carolina Peds to come to the Parent ED Night, so we look forward to seeing everyone there. Thank you, Andra, for sharing that today.
If you want to register for that class, then come on out. You can go to our website at carolinapeds.com and look at Parent ED Night under the program section.
Andra Sylvanus:
Yeah. I’ll see you there.
Summer McMurry:
All right, thank you.