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Childhood Stress
Mini-Articles
Anxiety as a Catalyst to Disordered Eating
Childhood Stress
Anxiety as a Catalyst to Disordered Eating
To a large extent, children are born with genetic predispositions to anxiety. It is coded in the genes. However, environmental factors can trigger these anxious responses which typically take the form of compulsive behaviors such as quirky or picky eating, or even food restriction and over-exercise. One 5 year old youngster was so worried about becoming fat that she compulsively jogged around the school yard during recess time every day. Some kids fidget to burn calories.
The effect on brain development of malnutriton can be extreme. In actual fact, eating disorders are the most lethal of all the mental health disorders. It has been proven that a child needs enough fat in his or her diet for the neurons of the brain to develop, all through a child's adolescence and into the early twenties. Children who are preoccupied with thoughts about food and weight management typically cannot think about anything else and so cannot learn effectively.
Signs of eating excesses or inflexibilty are a parent's most easily visible cue that their child is suffering from anxiety and is undergoing stress. Not only are these behaviors a sign that a child is anxious or stressed, but these behaviors also contribute to making a child's anxiety worse. When there are eating problems, it is important for parents to deal with the eating behaviors, but equally as important to address the stresses and sources of anxiety that gives rise to them.
Note that sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar" and that early eating problems can be set off by something as benign and easily fixable as the parent's own modeling of less than healthy eating behaviors.
About Abigail H. Natenshon
Abigail H. Natenshon, MA LCSW has been a psychotherapist in private practice specializing in the treatment of eating disordered individuals and their families for the past 28 years. She is co-founder and director of Eating Disorder Specialists of Illinois; A Clinic without Walls, and the author of When Your Child Has an Eating Disorder: A Step-by-Step Workbook for Parents and Other Caregivers (Jossey Bass, San Francisco, October, 1999). Visit her web sites at www.empoweredparents.com and www.empoweredkidZ.com
CONTACT:
Abigail Natenshon, MA, LCSW
Telephone 847-432-1795
Fax: 847-266-9233
Highland Park, Illinois 60035
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