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Toddler Menu Planner
Toddler Menu Planner

Use our Toddler Meal planning tool to ensure your 1-4 years old receives a balanced diet every day.

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Portion Sizes for 1-4 year olds

Use our portion size ranges to find out how much is too much.

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Tot It Up

Use our toddler food tracker to check that your 1-4 year olds are getting a good balance of foods and activity

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Why Breast Milk Matters

This educational programme for frontline professionals contains a range of practical resources on infant feeding.

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Guidance & Tips for Parents

Finger foods help babies to develop their self-feeding skills and learn to recognise different foods.

Feeding your baby new foods can seem like a daunting experience and you may be reluctant to give finger foods, however early in complementary feeding (weaning) soft finger foods offer the opportunity for babies to:

  • Touch and play with food
  • Learn to recognise foods visually and to associate them with their smell and taste
  • Develop their self-feeding skills

Soft finger foods can be introduced from early on in the weaning process. They give the opportunity for your baby to be involved in the meal and become more familiar with different foods through touch, sight and smell.

Soft finger foods to offer from the beginning of weaning

Soft roasted, steamed or boiled vegetable sticks, e.g. carrot, courgette, parsnip, pepper, potato and sweet potato

Cooked vegetable pieces, e.g. cauliflower and broccoli florets

Soft fruit pieces. e.g. mango, melon, banana, soft ripe pear, peach, papaya and kiwi

Cooked pasta pieces

Soft toast crusts

Soft cheese sticks

Pieces of fish or fish and potato cake – remove any bone

You can begin to offer firmer finger foods from around 9 months old, with many babies being able to self-feed firmer finger foods by 12 months of age.

Firmer finger foods – begin offering from around 9 months

Pieces of raw ripe fruit e.g. plums, apricots, strawberry pieces, apples

Fruits with the pips or stones removed e.g. halved cherries, halved grapes, and segments of oranges, satsumas and clementines

Raw vegetables: sticks of cucumber, peppers, courgette, carrot

Crusts of bread or toast, rice cakes, oatcakes, crackers, bread sticks

Pitta bread strips with hummus or peanut butter

Sandwiches with soft fillings

Cheddar cheese pieces

Soft cooked pieces of meat loaf, burger, chicken, falafel, bhaji and other very soft, slow cooked meat

Remember: Avoid soft round pieces of food e.g. cherry tomatoes, whole grapes, rounds of sausage – cut them in half so they are not round

A small number of babies may take much longer to learn to accept and manage these tastes and textures – keep offering them!