I'm asking this because on Mumsnet recently there have been endless threads about how people who do BLW are 'too rigid', 'pretend they are superior', 'aren't open-minded', don't actually respond to their childrens' perceived desire to be spoon fed etcetera etcetera. A lot of the discussion seems to centre around the term 'baby-led' specifically, which people (not BLWers) are interpreting as 'doing whatever method of feeding you think your baby wants, including spoon feeding if the baby has been spoon fed and preferred it'. Which is, to me at least, being 'baby-led' in the sense that everything you do is baby-led if you're a parent, but not Baby-Led Weaning as it relates to the research and the concept.

To be honest, I can't really be bothered getting into it on Mumsnet again, as it's all getting far too attritional but I'm interested in finding out what the term means to you lot. To me, it's simply a slightly cheesy descriptor for the concept of BLW, that you pretty much don't spoon feed, instead preferring to let the child pick up food and explore taste, weight and texture, eating what they want and then squdging the rest through their fingers if need be. And that as parents we don't panic that they're not getting enough food.

Because I've always been confident that milk would make up the bulk of DD's nutrition I've never spoon fed her, but that's not really an ideological stance against spoons, just a matter of having read the Rapley research and thought 'that seems to make sense to me, I'll give that a try' and then never feeling the need to spoon feed her as she was demonstrably capable of feeding herself.

So, what do you think? Am I being too irritable in thinking that it's ludicrous to get hung up on the BL of BLW, when it's quite clearly the concept that counts and not the name?