Your baby eats kale? Of course he does.

Struggling to stick a spoonful of puree into a thrashing baby’s mouth, while muttering something about an aeroplane, is a rite of passage for every parent.

Or is it?

More parents are outsourcing the trickiness of the weaning stage, and offloading the hard work to… their babies.

When it comes to solids, these mums and dads are going hands-free, casting aside the plastic spoon and mashed banana, and presenting their bubs with an array of finger foods - everything from carrot spears to hunks of pork chop. And guess what? Most of the time, they're eating them.

It's called "baby-led weaning", or BLW if you're in the know, and it's got the internet talking this week.

New York Times blogger Julia Scirotto wrote of her BLW success earlier this week. When Julia's daughter Emma reached her 6-month birthday, she was handed control of her eating by mum and dad. Now, apparently, she's doing a better job of feeding herself  than Michelle Bridges:

Within a few weeks she was happily munching on apple slices baked with cinnamon, juicy peaches, cheddar, toast and watermelon. At seven months, she was stripping ripe pears down to the core like a hyena with a side of ribs ...

Recently, a friend from New York with adult children visited us in London, and she seemed surprised but impressed as Emma shoved fistfuls of steamed kale and roasted pumpkin into her mouth while we were out to lunch."

Kale, people. Kale. If you've got a baby who refuses to eat anything, let alone kale (by the fistful!), it's enough to make you green with envy. Kale-green, obviously.

Baby-led weaning, a term coined by baby-feeding expert Gill Rapley, apparently poses no greater threat of choking than spoon-fed puree. And, according to research from earlier this year, babies weaned through a self-directed approach were less likely to be overweight when they grew up, as they were more likely to stop eating when they were full.

So, even though it's notoriously messy, you can see why people are interested in exploring this movement. But is BLW a baby breakthrough, or just the latest thing for parents to feel smug about? Because let's be honest here, sometimes it seems parenting is just one big contest fuelled by each new trend that rises to prominence.

It only takes one slightly delayed milestone or baby-like behaviour to attract the judgemental looks:

and/or the smug remarks:

"Oh, your baby eats banana? That's nice. Now watch mine shuck an oyster."

"The Wiggles? Oh, no. Oliver has already moved onto Q.I. He's a huge Stephen Fry fan."

Maybe that's a slight exaggeration (let's hope so). But really, does it matter whether your 6-month-old prefers apricot puree to kale? Often it seems these new-fangled parenting trends are less about benefiting the baby - even though many do - and more about making parents feel more accomplished, or insightful, or just better.

Surely parenting is about doing the best you can for your baby, regardless of what other parents, or celebrities, or "experts" do and say and think. If you want to explore new trends and encourage your baby to feed herself (or learn three languages, or write a sonnet...) from the age of six months, there's nothing wrong with that. Likewise - if you're happy with keeping the kale to yourself and feeding your bub mush with a spoon for a while, that's okay too.

Do you feel secretly smug about what your kid will eat? Or are you hiding vegetables in cupcakes?