How do I talk about it?
It’s about expressing one’s concern for the whole child. To say, “I’ve been watching and I noticed that you don’t seem happy, you seem really distressed, these are the kinds of things I’m noticing. Let’s talk a bit about what’s happening in your life.”
Explore how the child is coping at school, on the sports field, in their social world, at home. What kinds of pressures are there at home, that as a parent you just think are normal that might be affecting the child quite negatively?
Those remain the most important things to do, and to help the adult child to look at the pros and cons of their behaviour, and to try and motivate them into seeing that they can be a different way, a more positive and healthier way, to actually solve some of their underlying issues.
With a child who is younger and who is at home, it’s the parent’s responsibility to care for their child, and that may mean taking an enormously reluctant child to the doctor, to therapy, which may or may not be a barrier in the community, but children get sick faster and more seriously because they have fewer resources. And also the earlier one can identify and treat an eating disorder the better the prognosis is.
What are the signs?
A universal symptom of someone who is suffering from a food and weight preoccupation or an eating disorder is dissatisfaction with their bodies, and that’s one of the core features of classification for anorexia nervosa or bulimia. Some research in the South Asian community indicates that there might be a different symptom profile for anorexia. So some research with South Asian adolescents in Britain showed that individuals with an eating disorder showed less frequent weight preoccupation and fat phobia than other adolescents who were part of the study who were Caucasian. And in a comparison of Canadian girls and South Asian Indian girls, the body dissatisfaction scores were similar for both groups, but the concerns were different with regards to the body parts that the girls expressed dissatisfaction with.
So I think it’s really important to look at the individual, and parents are in the best position because they know their children. Often we forget that some of the concern that individuals with eating disorders have is about how they appear to others, and whether they are meeting the expectations that they have internalized. So (look for signs of) depression or irritability, which is very common with dieting and malnutrition, guilt or shame about eating, strict avoidance of certain foods, particularly those that are considered fattening, and again this is going to be very culture-bound, and bound by the family norms of what is usual food presented in that home.
And then of course frequent weight fluctuations, or noticeable weight loss. And it’s really important for concerned parents, if they do see these kinds of symptoms, to actually test out what they’re about—so not to necessarily immediately jump to the conclusion that there might be an eating disorder, but to tease out whether there’s actually some kind of physical reason, medical reason, for these problems.
It’s not about YOU
Both mothers and fathers have significant roles to play in how their children understand their own value and the value of others, and kids are very quick to pick up discrepancies between how a parent behaves and what they say. That said, parents are not the only influences in a child’s life, and you can have two children growing up with the same parents who have markeably different perceptions of themselves and their values. So there’s also a role for the individual’s personality to play, to have an impact on how the individual child becomes either more vulnerable to developing emotional problems that might be acting out with food and weight preoccupation, or becomes simply more resilient because of their characteristics. So it’s a complex mix of social influences, family dynamics and values and norms, and the individual’s genetic makeup and their personality.
For more information and help with eating disorders, visit the National Eating Disorder Information Centre.
