Speedup Feeding

Like most babies of his generation, Dr. Walter W. Sackett Jr. (born in 1905) tasted no solid food until he was almost a year old. Nowadays U.S. mothers generally give their babies cereal within three months. To Miami's Dr. Sackett, a general practitioner, this is far too late; babies under his care have a spoon of thin oatmeal or barley when they are but two days old. At ten days vegetables are added; at 14 days, strained meats; at 17 days, strained fruits; at weekly intervals thereafter, orange juice, eggs, soups, mashed banana, custard puddings and "crisp bacon" (though the bacon has to be mashed with a fork).

Acceleration applies also to milk and feeding periods, Dr. Sackett reports in the current issue of the magazine G.P. He has no patience with feeding baby "on demand"; he thinks six-hour intervals are fine at first, but that the midnight bottle should be cut out within five weeks, and the baby put on three meals a day. He also says that the baby should be weaned (from either bottle or breast feeding) to the spoon at seven months, and that by ten or twelve months he should be able to "eat almost entirely from the table with the rest of the family."

After trying this revolutionary routine with 600 babies, Dr. Sackett is convinced that they have fewer feeding problems than average, less vomiting and diarrhea, and that they develop normally. Their mothers, he reports, are enthusiastic.

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