How Parents Can Educate Children About Eating Disorder Prevention

Parents have a difficult job trying to keep their children safe in today’s society from all the issues that children come across. What are you doing to prevent your child from an eating disorder?

According to an article at ahaparenting.com, “How to Teach Children to Have a Healthy Body Image”

“In this culture, unfortunately, many of us eat diets that aren’t very healthy, and we don’t get enough exercise. That’s true for our kids, too. In fact, experts suggest that this is the first generation that’s less healthy than their parents.

Unfortunately, when you mix kids’ junk food consumption and lack of exercise with our cultural obsession with thinness, it’s a perfect storm for eating disorders. Guess how many teens in the US will develop eating disorders? 23% of girls and 6% of boys!

Eating disorders–as you probably know–are a serious risk factor for your child. Parents have a lot more power than they realize to prevent eating disorders, but your intervention works best when it starts early. Intervening in adolescence, when kids need to assert their right to control their own bodies, is tricky and less effective.
What can you do to prevent your child from developing an eating disorder? Help your child develop a healthy body AND a healthy body image.

1. Consider your attitude toward your own body. I hope you LOVE your body, every inch of it. But most of us have been influenced by our culture’s obsession with thin, and we judge ourselves harshly. When we see our child starting to put on weight, we worry that she’ll have a life-long struggle with her weight. Unfortunately, our kids pick up on our fear, and they assume something’s wrong with them. So use this as an opportunity to develop a healthier relationship with your own body, so you don’t perpetuate that feeling of shame and “not good enough” onto another generation.

2. Educate your child about how the media presents thinness as equated with everything positive and perpetuates unrealistic images. Point out that all the models on the magazine covers have been air-brushed; they simply aren’t real. Terrific videos to show your daughter — and son! — are the Dove Evolution of Beauty Video (an ordinary young woman air-brushed into a billboard model) and Diet.com’s The PhotoShop Effect (showing how pervasive photoshop is, and how it has created an unrealistic standard of beauty against which we all judge ourselves.)” To read the entire article click here.

Barbara Cox of ABC Nutrition Services is the leading expert in eating disorders and nutritional therapy in Reno. To schedule an appointment contact ABC Nutrition Services at 775-329-0505 or visit ABCNutritionServices.com.