Kids are sent to school in the morning without a sack lunch. In a position to absorb their child's erupting pain, many parents feel threatened by their child's hostility or resistance to their advances. The very existence of the eating disorder bespeaks the individual's need to avoid having to face and resolve 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 to tolerate comfortably.
Many parents fail to recognize that they are dealing with a disease, and a lethal one at that.
Eating disordered behaviors are frightening and incomprehensible to parents particularly when these individuals fail to grasp that the essence of the eating disorder is not so much in food as it is in the underlying emotional issues driving eating dysfunction. A window into the emotional life and soul of the child, they provide 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. Parental roles in facilitating recovery will be varied and fluid, dictated by the changing needs and capacities of the child patient and by the requirements of disease and recovery.