Parents: Eating Disorders Aren't Your Fault

We stood in the hospital hallway, just outside her daughter's room. Inside, her child lay connected to a cardiac monitor, her heart rate hovering at a dangerously low 38 beats per minute, a complication of her anorexia nervosa. The mother was exhausted and scared. Her daughter had survived leukemia years earlier. Now, facing this different kind of medical crisis, she said something I'll never forget: "Cancer was easier than this."

She explained that with cancer, there had been meals delivered by neighbors, clear treatment protocols, and community support. People had rallied around them. But with the eating disorder, she felt paralyzed by shame. The shame kept her from telling extended family, from reaching out to friends, from informing the school.

The Weight of Unspoken Guilt

Most parents don't directly ask me if they caused their child's eating disorder. They don't have to. I hear it in the careful way they describe their own struggles with food. I sense it when they wonder aloud whether their own anxiety somehow planted seeds that grew into this illness. Or when they replay the family vacation when their child first started skipping meals, searching for the moment when it all went wrong.

The Science: What We Actually Know

Here's what the research tells us: eating disorders are multifactorial conditions with complex origins that we're still working to fully understand. They emerge from an intricate interplay of genetic predisposition, neurobiological factors, temperament, environmental influences, and societal pressures. And a society saturated with diet culture, one that has surrounded parents their entire lives with messages about "good" and "bad" foods, body ideals, and the moral value of thinness, definitely doesn't help. It is even infused into the medical field, where weight loss is sometimes prescribed.

No single factor causes an eating disorder. Not genetics alone. Not personality alone. Not diet culture alone. And certainly not parenting. Yet somehow, when all these forces converge in a child's life, we continue to look at parents and ask, "What did you do wrong?" The myth persists, despite everything we know about the biology and complexity of these illnesses.

The Damage of Blame and Shame

Society, clinicians, and media have a long history of blaming parents, particularly mothers, for their children's eating disorders. This outdated narrative does more than hurt feelings. It causes real, measurable harm in two critical ways.

First, shame keeps parents silent. It delays the moment when a worried parent voices their concerns and seeks help for their child. This delay is dangerous. Early intervention in eating disorder treatment offers the best prognosis for recovery. Every week spent wondering "Am I overreacting?" or "Will they think I caused this?" is a week where the illness can gain strength and become harder to treat.

Second, this blame perpetuates a broader stigma that eating disorders are somehow voluntary, vain, or a lifestyle choice. It prevents the appropriate alarm bells from ringing. Eating disorders have the second highest mortality rate of any mental health condition, second only to opioid use disorder. These are life-threatening diseases, not character flaws or parenting failures. When we blame parents, we obscure this truth and make it harder for society to respond with the urgency these illnesses demand.

The Reality: Parental Heroism

In my years of practice, what stands out is not parental failure, but parental heroism. I see mothers and fathers putting their careers on hold, turning down promotions, going part-time, or leaving jobs entirely, so they can attend multiple appointments each week, supervise every meal and snack, and remain present through the anxiety storms and battles at the dinner table. I see them learning to silence their own diet-culture conditioning so they can model food neutrality for their children. I witness them sitting with their child's distress for hours, absorbing rage, fear, and tears, because they know that consistency and love are what will save their child's life.

I see parents confronting their own relationships with their bodies, damaged by decades of the same toxic diet culture that contributed to their child's illness. They enter therapy, stop weighing themselves, and challenge their own food rules, doing the hard healing work in an attempt to support their children.

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Parents in eating disorder treatment are not the problem. They are the solution. Research consistently shows that family-based treatment, which positions parents as the primary agents of recovery, is one of the most effective approaches we have, particularly for adolescents.

What Parents Actually Need

Parents don't need judgment. They don't need shame or blame. They don't need another article suggesting that if they'd just cooked more family meals or been less anxious themselves, this wouldn't have happened.

Parents need our support. Practically, this means workplace policies that provide paid time off so parents can attend appointments and support recovery without losing their jobs. It means communities that rally around families the way they do for cancer, with meal trains, childcare help, and open acknowledgment of the crisis. It means clinicians who recognize warning signs early and take parental concerns seriously. It means their child's eating disorder is recognized as the serious medical condition it is, as worthy of urgent intervention as cancer, pneumonia, or diabetes.

Most of all, it means all of us, clinicians, family members, friends, communities, saying clearly and repeatedly: This is not your fault. You did not cause this. And you are exactly who your child needs to help them heal.