Eating disorders can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender, or background. They usually develop during adolescence or young adulthood, but they can begin earlier or later. Many young people and families live with eating disorders, and only a minority receive effective treatment.
When a young person develops an eating problem, seeking professional support is the first step. It’s very difficult for someone to recover from an eating problem on their own, and treatment and support are crucial for both the young person and their family.
When a young person is receiving treatment, their clinical team plays a core role in their recovery. But parents, peers, schools and other figures continue to have an important impact. The way that families approach a young person with eating disorders can nurture their recovery, but it can also hinder it.
That’s why it’s so important for parents to be open-minded, ready to learn and understand how they can support a young person living with an eating problem. Parents usually want the best for their child, but internalised societal practices and harmful social norms can sometimes cause them to unintentionally reinforce eating disorders. While effective treatment programs should include support for parents and carers, many treatment providers overlook parental support, leaving parents unsure how to act or unconsciously reproducing harmful practices.
Avoiding Pressure for High Achievement
Eating disorders are often closely connected to traits like perfectionism and low self-esteem. Disordered eating behaviours can be maladaptive coping mechanisms for low self-worth: without a broad sense of self-value or self-love, young people may start to place their self-value on their body shape or eating behaviours. They can also be a way to distract from or escape from these feelings.
Equally, perfectionist traits can reinforce body dissatisfaction, underpinning disordered eating behaviours.
When parents pressure young people to achieve at school or in extra-curricular activities, academically or otherwise, it can increase feelings of failure and low self-esteem. Placing value on high achievement also encourages adolescents to develop and maintain perfectionist traits that exacerbate eating disorders.
Rather than valuing young people for their achievements, parents should let children know that they are valued as a person, regardless of their accomplishments. Instead of praising a child for something they have achieved, praise them for how they engaged in the process, for example, for their creativity or care. Encourage them to appreciate their strengths, whether that’s kindness, dedication, or passion, without focusing on outcomes.
Don’t Accommodate or Enable Disordered Eating Behaviours
When an adolescent is living with an eating disorder, parents are often faced with conflicts. Overcoming disordered eating behaviours is difficult, and young people with eating disorders often try to maintain harmful eating patterns even when they are in treatment. They may ask their parents if they can eat less food, only eat at certain times of day, or only eat diet products.
It’s important that parents don’t accommodate these behaviours, even when disagreement can create tension and feel tough. Parents might feel like these ‘compromises’ are a way to ensure their child eats something rather than nothing, but they ultimately enable behaviours that sustain eating disorders. Changing restrictive eating patterns is vital for teenagers to recover.
Take Care of Your Own Speech and Attitudes
Humans are inherently social beings, and our opinions, attitudes, and perspectives are shaped by those around us. Parents tend to play a particularly central role in influencing young people’s perspectives and behaviours.
Whether or not a young person is living with an eating disorder, we need to create a positive culture around food and body image, where body shape and size aren’t associated with health, beauty, fitness, or any other value. We should discourage dieting behaviours, understanding food and eating as a way to care for and nourish our minds and bodies, to bring us together socially, and to enjoy.
When parents make comments about body size, weight, or dieting, it has the opposite effect, encouraging young people to value themselves on their appearance and eating behaviours, and to understand certain body types as more desirable than others. Both positive, negative, or neutral comments about your body shape or the body shape of others are harmful and can push young people with eating disorders into distressing negative cycles.
Understand That Eating Disorders Can Affect Anyone
Many of us have specific ideas about the types of people who develop eating disorders. In particular, eating disorders are often thought not to affect men and boys. However, research suggests that in some places, boys and men now represent around a third of those diagnosed with eating disorders.
Eating disorders might affect teenage boys differently from other gender identities, and with symptoms that parents are less familiar with. While some teenage boys with eating disorders are preoccupied with thinness, others may be focused on masculine ideals, such as muscle growth and leanness. They may engage in disordered eating behaviours like bulking and cutting, using protein shakes, excessive exercise and sometimes steroids to rapidly build muscle, before following a restrictive diet to increase leanness. These behaviours cause serious harm to young people, both psychologically and physically.
Parents can sometimes overlook or minimise eating disorders among men because they don’t fit into stereotypes of what eating disorders look like. However, challenging these stereotypes is crucial in supporting teenage boys and men to receive the care they need.
Eating Disorders Can Affect People of All Body Shapes and Sizes
Parents sometimes minimise the seriousness of a young person’s eating disorder because their body doesn’t resemble the type of body they associate with eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex mental health conditions underpinned by emotions, ways of thinking, socio-emotional traits and interpersonal relationships. Most people with an eating disorder diagnosis are at a normal or higher body weight, and you cannot judge the severity of an eating problem by the body a young person lives in.
Unfortunately, a traditional clinical focus on body shape and weight often prevents young people from receiving the treatment they require and acts as a barrier to full and lasting recovery. It’s vital that parents challenge these misconceptions and avoid invalidating a young person’s distress by focusing on size and appearance.
Seeking Expert Support
Parenting a young person with an eating disorder is often very challenging, and parents often find themselves in situations that exceed the skills they have learnt or naturally hold. It’s normal for parents to react to a young person’s eating disorder in ways that are unhelpful, despite their best intentions. That’s why it’s crucial that parents receive support too.
When a child has an eating problem, it’s important for parents to receive expert advice. If family therapy or parenting coaching isn’t included in a young person’s treatment program, parents should reach out to mental health professionals to better understand how to support a young person and avoid enabling disordered eating behaviours. Mental health professionals can also help parents navigate the anxiety, distress, and tension that many families experience.
The Wave Clinic: Specialist Eating Disorder Programs for Young People and Families
The Wave Clinic offers specialist eating disorder treatment programs for young people and families living with eating disorders. Our residential and intensive outpatient programs combine exceptional clinical care with supported mealtimes, after-school eating clubs, activities, enriching experiences and education.
We offer a variety of different treatment approaches, including:
- EMDR
- Trauma-informed therapy
- Interpersonal therapy
- Creative arts therapy
- Experiential therapies
- Extensive family therapy
- MANTRa
- DBT or RO-DBT
- Nutrition support
- Supported eating
Across our recovery programs, we focus on the development of valuable life skills, including:
- Social skills and teamwork
- Establishing safety in the body, interpersonal relationships, and community
- Shopping and cooking skills
- Identity formation and exploration
- Internet, social media and phone use
Our programs are family-centred, emphasising the powerful role of families in eating disorder recovery. We support parents and families to develop new skills, transform family dynamics, and create new ways of relating in practice, through memory creation and collective exploration.
If you’re interested in our eating disorder programs in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or Dubai, UAE, reach out to us today. You can contact us via our website, by phone or via WhatsApp at +60125227734.
