The Parent Connection in Eating Disorders
Recovery: Squeaking the Recovery Wheel
Part One
By Abigail Natenshon

Ninety percent of eating disordered victims are adolescents living at home with parents and families. Symptoms of these disorders (along with their recovery) are an integral part of daily living, unfolding before parents’ eyes virtually everywhere..... at the dinner table, in bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens, in conversation and in attitudes. Parents and families become victims of these diseases simply by virtue of living alongside the eating disorder phenomenon.

Even the most competent and adept parents find themselves feeling defeated, at a loss for what to think, how to behave and how to support their child in the throes of this mystifying disease. Believing that they are the cause of their child’s disorder, they assume that by intervening they could make an already bad situation worse. Parents fear that the very mention of food or weight could inspire an eating disorder in their healthy child, particularly in light of the statistic that 80% of children in grades three to six express dissatisfaction with their bodies, and that eating disorders have become the disease of choice for the expression of anxiety in youth today.

Parents living alongside these diseases typically have little choice but to become involved with their child in the healing process. Parental involvement in many cases makes eating disorder recovery a more timely, complete, and lasting process.

Despite this reality, parents deal with numerous impediments to their effective involvement.

*Parents frequently do not understand eating disorders, nor the toll they take on the child.

*Bombarded by societal norms that reinforce food and fat phobias and beleaguered by misconceptions and stereotypes about eating disorders, many parents assume that it is a normal and acceptable rite of passage for teenagers to be obsessed with weight and to restrict food. They assume that their child’s depression and irritability is “normal” teenage behaviors,

*Under the influence of fickle and often conflicting diet fads and trends, many parents have virtually forgotten what healthy eating is. Fat-free eating is not healthy eating.

*Parents assume that eating disorders are incurable, that “once eating disordered, always eating disordered.”

*Clinicians are typically adamant about parents staying out of their child’s treatment and their food, cautioning that such discussions would lead to power struggles, alienation, and frustration. Assuming that parental involvement is intrusive and prying rather than supportive, they consider it a deterrent to the child’s budding autonomy and separation from the family, and a threat to the child’s privacy and the confidentiality of the treatment process. In actual fact, a parent’s involved concern in no way precludes his or her respect for the child’s privacy or independence. Nor does a therapist necessarily breach therapy confidences by educating a parent to assist in their child’s healing.

*Many parents believe that by the time their child has reached early adolescence, peers, social norms, and the media will have usurped their influence. In actual fact, parents inadvertently encourage emotional disconnection by relinquishing their authority over their children at increasingly younger ages. Seven and eight year olds are sent away to over-night summer camps. 12 year olds are given full access to credit cards. Cell phones are often the primary means for communicating with teens on the go and behind the wheel. Kids are sent to school in the morning without lunch. In 50% of American homes, the traditional family dinner has gone by the wayside.

*Many parents feel threatened by their child’s hostility or resistance to their advances. Assuming the parent/child relationship to be a fabric so fragile as to unravel with the first pull of a single thread, many parents have little tolerance for the candor, anger or rudeness that confronting a disordered child might engender. In fact, the very existence of the eating disorder bespeaks the child’s tendency to avoid facing and resolving problems squarely.

*Living alongside an eating disorder recovery can be divisive and unsettling for parents, whether or not they become involved in the process. Treatment signifies change, and change may represent a risk too great for the child and parent to tolerate comfortably.

Understanding eating disorders and the parent’s role in recovery
Many parents fail to recognize that they are dealing with a disease, and a lethal one at that. Eating disorders are not so much about food as about the underlying emotional issues driving the dysfunctional behaviors. Anorexia and bulimia affect the child’s cognitive mind, body, emotions and relationships; they are disorders of coping and problem solving, of distortion and extremes, of choicelessness and fear, of mood and self-control.

A window into the emotional life and soul of the child, the disorder provides parents an invaluable opportunity to recognize and correct emotional disturbances, immaturity, and attitudes that could otherwise derail the child’s effective development into adulthood.

Eating disorders are a green light for parents to take charge and take action in a situation where the child is consummately, and hopefully temporarily, out of control. Parents need to learn how and when to intervene.

Proactive parents respond to their eating disordered child on three levels;
1. by confronting the child,
2. by searching out the most effective professional help.
3. by partnering with professionals and child against the disease, as a committed member of the treatment team.


Parental Role - Parental Task
Observer - Identifying the problem
Educator - Educating the child about the disease
Facilitator - Encouraging the child to accept treatment
Researcher - Finding the appropriate treatment
Partner in recovery - Participating in the treatment team
Interpreter of the treatment process - Supporting the work of the therapist
Mentor - Keeping the treatment successful
Guardian of the relationship - Making changes as the child does*

*Excerpted from When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers, Natenshon, JBP 1999