This weekend the internet told me not to give my baby bananas.

Not oats. Not pasta. Not rice.

And I want to be really clear about something before we go any further. The problem is not any one of those videos. Most of them are made by people who care, and most of them are technically defensible if you look at the research they are pointing to.

The problem is what all of them together are doing to you.

The pile up

In the same scroll, I saw a breakdown of soft-boiled versus hard boiled eggs and the damage one is supposedly doing.

I saw sweet potato being ranked above pumpkin.

I saw a lunchbox with filet mignon in it.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a target of one hundred foods before your baby turns one.

None of those pieces of content is wrong on their own terms. That is exactly what makes this so hard. You cannot dismiss any single one of them, so you carry all of them. And the rules stack up until feeding your baby stops feeling like feeding your baby and starts feeling like a test you are quietly failing every day.

What worries me is not the food

I have been doing this long enough to see what the pile up actually costs, and it is almost never the nutrition.

It is how anxious parents have become about feeding their kids.

I understand exactly how we got here. You care. You want to get it right. So you take in everything you can find, and every rule you collect feels like one more layer of protection around your child.

But here is what I keep coming back to.

Kids absorb the energy around food long before they understand the nutrition in it.

If every meal comes with tension, hesitation and a mental list of rules attached, that is what they learn food is. They are not reading the ingredient label. They are reading you.

And the whole reason we are doing any of this is so they grow up eating well and feeling easy about it. A child who eats a beautifully balanced plate while their parent holds their breath through every bite has not been given the thing we were actually trying to give them.

Let's strip it back

Most parents think feeding kids is complicated.

It is not. We have just been taught to overcomplicate it.

Here is the version I give parents when they come to me exhausted from the noise.

If you can get an egg into your kid most days, that is close to nature's multivitamin. Protein, choline, iodine, B12, all in something that takes four minutes. Soft boiled, hard boiled, scrambled, folded into something else. The cooking method is not the thing standing between your child and good health.

Your kid likes steak or lamb? Iron, zinc and protein sorted in one go. Iron is the one I do pay close attention to from around six months, because babies are running down their own stores by then and it matters for development and for sleep. Red meat is the easiest way to cover it.

Berries? Antioxidants and fibre.

Yoghurt? Protein and calcium, and a really useful vehicle for anything else you want to add.

Real, whole food, most of the time. That is the whole thing. That is genuinely the whole thing.

The sugar question

Before anyone asks, yes, sugar is the one I would hold a line on. Not because of a single day, but because of what a daily habit does to appetite, to teeth, and to how a child learns to recognise fullness.

But your eleven month old having a bit of birthday cake is not undoing a single thing you have built.

A line you hold most of the time is still a line. It does not have to be airtight to work.

Where this connects to sleep

I cannot write about feeding without saying this part, because in my work they are never two separate topics.

When feeding is anxious, meals get short, distracted or rushed. When meals are short, intake drops. When intake drops, particularly protein and iron across the day, night waking tends to creep up. And then a tired parent goes looking for answers, finds more feeding content, and adds more rules.

That loop is very common and it is very fixable. Usually not by adding anything. Usually by taking things away.

What I would actually ask you to do

Pick the handful of foods your child already accepts and make those work harder for you. Add the egg. Add the full fat yoghurt. Cook in butter or olive oil. Offer the red meat twice a week.

Then let the rest of it go.

You do not need one hundred foods before one. You need a child who comes to the table without dread, and a parent who does too.

Get the foundations right and you can actually breathe.

If you are in the thick of starting solids and want the version without the noise, my Starting Solids Confidence Kit walks you through first foods, iron rich options and portion guidance in one place, so you can stop assembling a feeding plan out of thirty different reels.