Most breastfeeding campaigns, including a good many of ours, put enormous weight on the first six months and then go quiet. The six-month mark gets treated as a finish line. In terms of a child’s nutrition, it is closer to the start of the difficult part.
From around six months, breast milk alone stops being sufficient. Not because it has lost value, it has not, but because a growing baby’s requirements for energy, iron and zinc outrun what milk alone can supply. Food has to come in alongside. The window from six to twenty-three months is where a very large share of stunting is determined, and stunting, once established, is largely permanent.
Nigeria’s figures for this window are worse than our breastfeeding figures. Only 12 per cent of children aged six to twenty-three months eat a diet with sufficient variety, according to the NDHS 2024 summary. Stunting among under-fives sits at 40 per cent (NDHS 2023-24). Meanwhile 41 per cent of children in that age group are already consuming sweet drinks.
Read those two numbers together and the problem sharpens. It is not principally that children are eating nothing. It is that a great deal of what they are eating is doing no work.
A baby’s stomach at seven months holds very little. Every spoon that goes in is either building a child or occupying space that could have built a child. A bottle of soft drink, a biscuit, an over-diluted pap with nothing added, all of these fill a stomach and deliver close to nothing. In a household with limited money, that is an expensive way to fail.
What good complementary feeding looks like is not complicated or imported. Aim for a range across the day rather than a perfect single meal. A grain: pap, rice, tuwo, yam, maize. A protein at least once daily: beans, moi moi, egg, fish, meat, groundnut paste. A fruit: banana, pawpaw, mango, orange. A vegetable: ugu, soko, carrot, tomato. A little oil, palm oil included, which helps the child absorb vitamin A and adds the energy a small stomach needs in a small volume.
Enrichment is the technique most worth spreading. Plain pap is a weak food on its own. The same pap with groundnut paste stirred in, or with a mashed egg, or with milk, becomes a genuinely good meal without any new purchase for most households.
Texture moves in stages and people rush this or stall on it. Start smooth and soft at six months. By eight to nine months, mashed and lumpy, with things a baby can hold. By twelve months, most of what the family eats, softened and without excessive pepper or salt. Babies kept on smooth purée for too long frequently refuse texture later, and the refusal is learned rather than innate.
Patience is part of the method. A baby may need to be offered a new food eight or ten times before accepting it. Refusal on the first attempt is not a verdict. Most families stop offering after two or three tries and conclude the child dislikes it.
And through all of it, breastfeeding continues. WHO recommends breastfeeding to two years and beyond alongside adequate complementary food. In the second year, breast milk still supplies meaningful energy, high-quality protein, and continuing immune protection at exactly the age when a mobile toddler is encountering far more pathogens. Only 23 per cent of Nigerian children are breastfed to two years, according to UNICEF Nigeria in 2025, which is a large amount of free, high-quality nutrition being left on the table.
Two things, then. Add food at six months, with variety and enough energy density to matter. And keep feeding.
#ColourfulBowl. Post your baby’s most colourful plate this week. Call to action. Share your bowl. Save the guide. Hashtags. #ColourfulBowl #FirstWaveOfCare #WBW2026 #EkoNutrition
