Feeding Schedule for 6 to 12 Months

Milk stays the main event for the whole of this year, and meals are built around it: roughly four or five milk feeds and one meal at six months, moving towards three or four milk feeds and three meals plus a snack by twelve. The figure that makes sense of that is the WHO's, and almost nobody prints it: breast milk can provide half or more of a child's energy needs between 6 and 12 months, and a third between 12 and 24 months. So solids this year are a skill being learned, not a replacement for the nutrition.

Say the awkward part plainly before the sample days: no health body publishes a feeding timetable for this year. The NHS, the AAP and the WHO all publish what to offer and how to judge readiness, and none of them publishes a clock. Everything below with a time attached is a starting pattern, not a prescription.

Why the WHO figure changes how the day looks

If milk is half or more of what she is running on at six months, then a day that pushes milk aside to make room for purée has the arithmetic backwards. The meals are practice: sitting up, holding, chewing, swallowing, tasting. The milk is the food. That is also why a day of refused meals costs less than it feels like it does — the calories were never in the meals to begin with.

It flips gradually rather than at a birthday. By twelve months solids are carrying much more of the load, and after the first birthday breast milk is around a third of energy needs. Nobody publishes the month in which the balance tips, because it tips at a different point for every child.

Milk first or solids first, and when it stops mattering

Early on, order matters. A baby who arrives at a spoon starving is not in a mood to practise anything, so a meal that follows a milk feed usually goes better than one that replaces it. The two are often close together at the start — milk, then the spoon twenty minutes later, once she is content rather than hungry.

The order stops mattering somewhere in the second half of the year, when meals get big enough to be meals. By then most families find the milk drifting to the edges of the day — morning, before bed, and one or two in between — and the meals sitting where the rest of the household eats. Neither the timing nor the crossover is published anywhere this site may cite; it is what families describe, and it is here so the schedules you have already read have something to sit against.

Three loose stages, drawn as windows

Times below are windows because a printed hour is a fiction. Wake-up moves, naps move, and everything downstream of them moves too. Use them as a shape to start from and let her edit it.

Around 6 to 7 months: one meal

• Wake somewhere around 6.00 to 7.30 — milk on waking.
• Mid-morning, a milk feed.
• Early afternoon, milk, then the meal twenty minutes or so later, while she is fresh rather than tired.
• Late afternoon, a milk feed.
• Bedtime milk, as part of the wind-down.

One small amount once a day is the whole ambition here. Solids by age covers what goes in the bowl; this page only covers where it sits in the day.

Around 7 to 9 months: two meals

• Milk on waking.
• Breakfast, an hour or so later.
• Milk mid-morning, usually before or after a nap.
• Lunch or an early tea, with water in an open or free-flow cup.
• Milk in the late afternoon, and again at bedtime.

The AAP's rough size for a meal at this stage is about 4 ounces — a band to recognise rather than a target to reach, because appetite varies from day to day and from meal to meal.

Around 10 to 12 months: three meals and a snack or two

• Milk on waking, then breakfast.
• A snack mid-morning if the gap needs one.
• Lunch, water with it.
• A milk feed or a snack in the afternoon.
• Dinner with the family, then bedtime milk.

By this point the day usually looks like everybody else's, in smaller pieces and without the salt. If you want the sleep half of the same day drawn alongside it, wake windows at 9 to 12 months and the schedule generator handle that; there is no point building meals around naps that are not real yet.

When the milk feeds start to drop

They drop on their own, mostly. A feed gets refused, or picked at, or forgotten in the shuffle of a busier day, and after a fortnight of that it has gone. Following her is the method here, because there is no chart to follow: the AAP's whole answer to how often a baby eats is to feed her when she seems hungry and watch her rather than the clock. The one figure it does publish for the far end of the year is that most breastfed infants take roughly 4.5 ounces at a year, up from about 1 ounce in the first few weeks.

What is worth not doing is cutting a milk feed to make room for a meal. If milk is half or more of her energy this year, that trade goes the wrong way, and it is the commonest way a good week of eating turns into a bad fortnight.

Water, and what changes at twelve months

Water goes with meals from six months, in an open cup or a free-flow cup rather than a valved one, so she learns to sip rather than to suck. That is standard weaning practice and it is not in the claims registered on this site, so take it as a pointer rather than as a quotation.

At the first birthday the milk itself changes. Before 12 months, breast milk or first infant formula are the options — first infant formula is the only suitable alternative to breast milk under a year. From the age of 1, pasteurised whole cows' milk can be a main drink, and the NHS's figure from then is at least 350ml of milk a day or 2 servings of dairy, full fat until she is 2.

Iron, which is the part worth being deliberate about

Iron and zinc are named by the AAP as things to include from the start of solids, and the NHS's food groups put the same job on beans, pulses, fish, eggs, tofu and meat — a minimum of 2 portions a day from vegetable sources or 1 from animal sources, and at least 1 portion of oily fish a week. This is the one nutritional item in this year that is worth planning rather than letting happen, because it is the one that milk alone stops covering.

Three refused meals in a day is a normal day

It is. Appetite over a week is the thing to look at rather than appetite at lunchtime, and that framing is a rule of thumb rather than a published test. The NHS's instruction for every meal is the same as it was on day one: go at her pace, stop when she turns away or closes her mouth, never force her, and offer a rejected food again another day.

What is worth a phone call is not a bad meal but a pattern: weight gain that has stalled, a drop in wet nappies, a baby who is unusually sleepy or hard to rouse, or coughing and struggling with textures she managed a month ago. What comes out the other end is the check that goes with this one, and a fortnight written on the feeding chart or the day log is the evidence a health visitor can read in half a minute.

Sleep does not follow from any of this, and it is worth saying because the schedules on other sites imply it does — nothing published connects a bigger dinner to a longer night. The readiness page carries the NHS's sentence on that. Where she sleeps does not change this year either: on her back, on a firm flat mattress, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys.

This page is general information, not medical advice, and it cannot see your baby. Anything about her growth, her intake or a food she cannot manage belongs with your health visitor, GP or pediatrician.