Eating Disorders
Articles
Eating Disorder
Education:
Benefits for Parents and Teens
by Joanna Poppink, M.F.T.
Sometimes parents are afraid that educational materials
about eating disorders will stimulate an eating disorder in their teenager.
They also fear such material will encourage a teenager with an eating disorder
to try new and different methods of acting out the illness. Sometimes loving
parents are afraid to know specific information about eating disorders
themselves. They think that if they ignore the subject it will keep the
disorder out of their lives.
While providing information is powerful, I want to reassure parents that
information about eating disorders will not cause an eating disorder to develop
in their child. By the same token, such information will not cure a person,
teen or any age, who is suffering from an eating disorder. Treatment consisting
of compassion, understanding, and specific clinical expertise is required for
recovery.
While eating disorder educational programs will not cure an existing eating
disorder, such programs have many benefits for both parents and teens. Programs
can:
- alert parents and children to the nature of eating disorders;
- show the physical and psychological risks involved in acting out an eating
disorder;
- explain how to recognize when they or someone they know needs help;
- and most importantly describe many ways to start treatment and bring help
and guidance to the individual with the eating disorder and their families.
Educational programs are needed because often early stages of an eating
disorder go unrecognized by everyone, including the person with the disorder.
Everyone eats. Plus, there are many ways of eating and not eating that are
socially sanctioned for particular occasions. For example, it's socially
acceptable to eat junk food, even large quantities of it, at parties or at the
movies. It's also socially acceptable to diet and try fad diets that might
include fasting. It has become acceptable to acknowledge 'comfort foods' such
as chocolate or ice cream as means of coping with stress or disappointment.
It would be very difficult to distinguish a newly forming bulimic from a
non-bulimic person when both are devouring lots of sweets and treats at a
pajama party. It would be difficult to distinguish a newly forming anorexic
teenager from her teenage friends when they are all experimenting with exotic
diets and judging every aspect of their body as too fat. Plus, the anorexic
and/or bulimic who is first experimenting with vomiting, rather than being
worried or frightened, is usually quite happy at discovering a 'trick' to help
her think she is avoiding the consequences of holding and digesting any food
she eats. She doesn't know herself that she has found a dangerous activity that
helps her dull her ability to feel, to be aware of her surroundings and to
respond in a healthy way to stress in her life.
Parents may be reassured to know that eating disorder education might be a
wake up call that jars the consciousness of young people in an early stage of
an eating disorder. Through education a young girl might recognize herself as
being on her way to having a serious disorder.
If she knows the symptoms, knows there is supportive and caring help
available and knows how to ask for that support and help she has an opportunity
to get some early healing. With encouragement and support from adults and peers
in her environment, she has a chance of redirecting herself before the disorder
advances to relationship destroying and life destroying levels.
Eating disorder education can help parents become less fearful and more
understanding if their child does have an eating disorder. Parents can be
empowered to lovingly and more confidently support the healing efforts required
for their child to recover. With education and informed family support, the
child may be more willing and capable of doing the necessary healing work.
Early education presented clearly and sensitively with regard to the
developmental stage of the audience may provide a powerful way of waylaying an
eating disorder, encouraging informed and useful family cooperation to help a
child grow up healthy and free.
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