Know Thyself
By Abigail Natenshon

Though eating disorders are relatively speaking rare, the attitudes and beliefs that lead to them are not. Increasing numbers of young adults carry their unresolved personal struggles around eating and weight management with them from their youth to their life partnership and into the role of parent. Many experience guilt and regret for their difficulty providing their children the emotional and behavioral tools and skills they will need to become healthy eaters. Because parents’ personal attitudes and beliefs about food, eating, self-care and weight management are passed down as a legacy from one generation to the next, parents have little choice but to learn to deal effectively and simultaneously, with their own, as well as their children’s, eating issues.

Knowledgeable and proactive parents can virtually immunize their child against developing disordered eating and eating disorders, both of which carry the potential to compromise life and life quality.

Parents shape their child’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviors about eating and body image through role modeling and teaching, through nurturing the child’s self-esteem and enhancing positive assets. The nature and quality of a parent’s responses are particularly crucial where a child is genetically predisposed to addictions and eating disorders.

With so many children reaching puberty at younger ages now, eating and weight management issues and body image concerns are typically part of normal childhood development these days. As body image concerns are a risk factor for the onset of an eating disorder, parents need to learn to address a child’s issues before they become concerns, and to attend to concerns before they become problems, compromising life and life quality.


Taking a Look at Yourself.

1. In your effort to become more fit and healthy, do you consistently find yourself losing and regaining weight over time, through much effort, hardship and expense?
Yo-yo dieting is destructive to the body and sets a bad example for children.

2. Do your own preoccupations with food and eating leave you unable to concentrate at your job, or on your studies?
Eating disorders and body image problems in adult men and women can interfere in one’s quality of role and life function, relationships, parenting and marriage.

3. Do you hide your eating behaviors or feel reluctant to eat in front of others? Eating disorders are family diseases, which tend to show up during the course of daily living, in bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and dining rooms.

4. Have family dinners ceased to be a regular event in your house? Do you skip meals, choose not to cook or provide food for the family? Are you aware of if and when your child skips meals? Are you concerned?
Parents are their child’s most important life teacher and role models. When parents exhibit an unhealthy or imbalanced relationship with food, they may be demonstrating misconceptions and fears about food and eating that are likely to be transferred to their children.

5. Are you afraid that your teenager is beyond the age of listening to adults, especially to their parents? When parents subscribe to myths about who children are and what they need, it can jeopardize effective interpersonal exchanges.

6. Do you think it is normal for kids to be on a diet, that dieting is the best way to lose weight? Do you regularly purchase lite or fat free foods, or consult nutritional labels before purchasing a food item? All of these create risk factors for disease development.

7. Do you have difficulty recognizing, defining and resolving emotional problems? At times, would you prefer to simply “look the other way,” which leaves you feeling essentially out of control of your life?
Such a response and attitude may ultimately facilitate the onset of eating disorders in your child.

8. Do you find yourself over-eating compulsively for reasons other than satiating hunger? Do you eat or purge food out of habit, for comfort, or to numb you from emotional pain?
These may become symptoms of obesity, compulsive overeating, binge eating disorder or bulimia.

9. Do you find that if you are unable to work out regularly, you feel anxious and unable to function effectively that day?
This may be symptomatic of an activity disorder or an eating disorder.

10. Do you find yourself craving carbohydrates and refined sugars and once you eat them, you feel as though you can never get enough?
You may be struggling with a “sugar addiction,” which may become the precursor of obesity or other eating dysfunctions.

11. Do you feel guilty when you eat fatty foods?
This may be the result of a body image disturbance or of eating disordered attitudes and distortions. Does your child feel guilty eating the foods that you may be restricting?

12. Do you spend a lot of time in front of the television on a daily basis? Is the television running during meals? Do your children watch television instead of or while playing, studying or dialoguing it? A sedentary and imbalanced lifestyle can interfere with human interaction and may contribute to the onset of eating disorders or obesity.

13. Do you have healthy children who eat normally but you find yourself worrying that they may become eating disordered and out of control of food overnight? Eating disorders evolve over time and give clear warning for prevention if parents know what to look for. Frequently parents feel out of control of their own eating, vulnerable, and/or victimized by a food phobic society.

14. Does your child’s treatment and recovery at times seem to be going nowhere? Parents and caregivers need to find expert professional help with unique qualities who understands the unique requirements and protocols of eating disorder treatment. They need to become partners in the child’s recovery with the helping professionals.

15. Are there addictions or eating disorders in your family?
Susceptibility to eating disorders is passed through the genes, as well as learned through example and modeling.


That parents are pivotal in determining their child’s physical and mental health does not mean that parents are responsible (to blame) for their child’s eating disorder; it simply means that with awareness and knowledge, there is a great deal that empowered parents can do to help their child resist succumbing to the same food traps that have plagued them. Parents hold great potential to influence their child for good.