According to Jo Weston, founder of the Baby Led Kitchen, there are three R’s when it comes to weaning youngsters: respectful, responsive and realistic.

Jo, who lives at Hethersett near Norwich, set up her Instagram account for fun in 2016 when she was introducing her first daughter to solids.

Now a mum of three, the account has 186,000 followers and counting, there’s a recipe app, and her first book, Intuitive Weaning: For Calm Mealtimes and Happy Babies, which is packed with practical advice and tasty, easy to follow recipes, has just been published by Penguin.

Jo will be sharing advice and tips with parents at a special event at Waterstones in Norwich this Monday, May 16.

“I started the Instagram account just as a hobby to track what I was making for her,” says Jo. “Then people starting asking me for recipes and it started to grow.”

As Jo says, weaning babies can be a stressful time and parents put a lot of pressure on themselves to ‘get it right’.

“I’m not a nutritionist, I’m a teacher, so I come at weaning and baby food from a child development perspective rather than a nutrition perspective,” says Jo.

“My angle is more about how can we help babies to develop a really healthy relationship with food from day one and how we can use the weaning process to support their development,” she says.

“Rather than [saying] this is what we need to feed our babies, here is a strict schedule, this [my approach] is more about following baby’s own pace and their own interests and needs. Rather than starting with a method, it starts with the baby.

"It’s really watching to know what your baby’s telling you, what their body language is doing, and focusing on keeping mealtimes calm and happy in order to help babies feel comfortable at the table and to be able to listen to their own cues."

And this is where Jo’s three R’s, the key principles of intuitive weaning, come in.

“Respect is letting your baby make their own choices about food, to help them to build their confidence,” she explains.

“Responsiveness is really about listening to your baby’s personal preferences, rather than feeling like you’ve got to stick to strict rules.

"With baby-led weaning, sometimes people say you must never spoon feed your baby. On the other hand, you might have quite a strict traditional method that says to spoon feed your baby, when you don’t have to do either.

“And then the third R is realism, so understanding what to expect and accepting that weaning isn’t always linear, that sometimes your baby will have times where they go off their food or they really eat very little. It’s just about being realistic with it and not having too high expectations of yourself or your baby.”

Jo was approached by Penguin about writing a book around a year and a half ago.

“I thought it was a spam message and I nearly deleted it and then realised that she was actually genuinely from Penguin,” she laughs.

In the first half of the book, Jo explains her intuitive weaning approach and helps parents to understand how their babies might respond to food. There is also information about how to support toddlers who might be becoming a little fussier about their food.

“There is also some practical information about how to actually get food on to the table when you’ve got children and babies who are crying and fussy, or you’re working and you’re trying to juggle a million things,” says Jo who, with three children aged six and under, has lots of experience in that department.

Then there are more than 100 recipes for breakfasts, lunches and family dinners and a baking section aimed at getting the children involved and interested in food preparation.

“The recipes are all suitable from six months old and up, mostly with the focus on food that babies can feed themselves, and all things that can be cooked quite simply and quickly, but are also going to meet the baby’s nutritional needs,” says Jo.

The book also embraces family life in all its fun, imperfect, messy glory.

“That was an important part of the design of the book. At the beginning we said we want it to look really fun and not too tidy, because we’re trying to be realistic and get across the point that if children do make a mess, it’s actually quite good for them to play with their food and to use their senses, so there are lots of pictures of messy babies in the book and crumbs on the table in the photos.

“Everything that I cook is cooked in real time with children around my feet. I always say, if I struggled to cook something, or it’s been a faff or I’ve found it difficult it hasn’t made it on to my grid or on to the app or into the book, because I’ve struggled with it, other parents are going to struggle with it too.

“So all my recipes are completely parent and baby tested in the sense that they’re all cooked in real time and tested by real children.”

She also recommends getting children involved with cooking.

“The cooking is a really important part of our family life and I try to get them involved as much as I can, partly because it’s a way of keeping them busy while I’m cooking and I think if children have helped to be part of the cooking process it makes them a little bit more open to trying new things as well.”

Jo is candid about the reasons why laying the foundations for a lifelong healthy relationship with food at a young is so important to her.

“I think more than anything I want my children to grow up with a happy relationship with food and basically for food to not be an issue for them,” she says.

“In the past I’ve had a lot of eating problems myself, so I really believe that people should try to follow their own natural instincts with food, rather than be influenced by diet culture.

“I think so many adults struggle with over-eating or under-eating or just managing their own bodies. Being able to eat the right amount should be so easy, but it’s not for a lot of adults and I don’t want that for my children.

“And it made it important to me to be a really good role model for them and it really encouraged me. We don’t have scales in the house, diet talk is completely banned. The whole calories on menus thing is just not a world that I want my children to be part of.

“It’s been a real challenge for me, because how I behave around food rubs off on my children, definitely, so we try to be super body positive, even if I’m not feeling it, super food positive, and we eat everything here, nothing is restricted, my children eat chocolate, they eat ice cream, just all in balance and all positive.”

And what do mealtimes look like in Jo’s household?

“We eat a real mixture,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a bit hit and miss - all children go through fussy times.

“We tend to eat lots of things that the children can serve themselves with. Last week we had a really nice beef massaman curry with sides and chicken ramen. They’re all happy digging in, trying bits and bobs and leaving the bits they don’t want.

“Our family fish pie is definitely a classic. And peanut butter noodles. Anything with noodles – they love using chopsticks.”

Intuitive Weaning With Jo Weston is being held at Waterstones, Castle Street, Norwich on Monday, May 16, from 2pm. Tickets cost £14.99, including a copy of the book and babies are welcome. Find out more at waterstones.com/events

Intuitive Weaning: For Calm Mealtimes and Happy Babies by Jo Weston is out now, published by Penguin Books.

Follow Jo on Instagram @babyledkitchen