How To Feed Your Relationship During Eating Disorder Recovery 

“I keep trying to motivate my daughter into eating disorder recovery, but nothing I say seems to make a difference,” says Angela. “I need her to eat more and with less fuss, but it’s as if the more I tell her what to do, the less she listens. It’s incredibly frustrating and I don’t know what to do differently.” 

Like many parents, Angela has tried educating her daughter about the importance of nutrition and the value of recovering from her eating disorder. She wants to motivate recovery but has a feeling she needs to change her approach.

As she’s experienced first-hand, motivating a child into eating disorder recovery isn’t usually accomplished by creating the perfect argument. While food is important for treatment, eating disorders are about much more than food and are often tangled up in relational dynamics.

This is why nutrition information and speeches usually backfire. Motivating someone requires trust and emotional connection, and an authoritarian approach creates distrust and relational discord. 

A powerful way to motivate your child’s eating disorder recovery is to feed your relationship.

How can parents motivate eating disorder recovery?

Motivating someone requires trust, safety, connection, and autonomy. It begins not with telling but with listening and meeting your child’s deepest hunger for a secure relationship. 

“A lot of the parent’s role in recovery comes down to connection, the relationship, and emotional regulation,” says Rebecca Manley, founder of the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association (MEDA), who has been working in the field of eating disorders for 34 years. 

“A child is not a behavior,” she says. “So what is beneath the behavior? Instead of focusing so much on, ‘She just won’t do what she’s supposed to do,’ or, ‘I can’t believe she’s doing this,’ let’s focus on the behavior and why it’s there. What does she need? What’s missing here? Because the eating disorder is the voice of the unmet need.”

The deepest hunger is a secure relationship

A child’s deepest hunger is a secure relationship with their parent. Feeding this hunger means being confident and attuned, providing a consistent, respectful, positive environment, and helping your child feel understood and accepted. 

Feeding your relationship increases your influence and motivates the behavior change you want. Eating gets easier when your child is emotionally and physically regulated with you. Combined with professional treatment and a good feeding strategy, your relationship can supercharge recovery.

Under every behavior is a need

When your child has disordered eating behaviors, it’s natural to think that the problem is what they’re doing with food. Indeed, we need to address their eating behaviors and regulate their eating environment as much as possible. This is what’s behind FBT and other feeding strategies.

But there’s more. Because very few eating behaviors show up in a vacuum, and most eating behaviors get a response from you and other important people in your child’s life. These responses shape the future of the disordered pattern. 

“Food is a big communicator, and how your child is eating can be anxiety-producing for parents,” says Rebecca. “An anxious parent will literally telegraph their anxiety to their kids without saying a word. And when anxiety gets telegraphed to the kid, they don’t feel safe. And if they don’t feel safe, they’re not going to eat in a regulated way.”

9 ways to feed your relationship

Here are a few ways parents can feed their relationship with their child, creating a more stable, secure connection: 

1. Increase your emotional literacy and use emotional language with your child so they learn to express their emotional needs and ask for what they need
2. Regulate your emotions, which creates the foundation for your child’s ability to self-regulate (your child can’t be more regulated than you are)
3. Uphold high standards and a growth mindset, so they know you believe in their abilities and support them
4. Maintain interpersonal boundaries, so they know you believe they can tolerate distress and builds resilience
5. Show delight upon seeing your child so they know you enjoy their presence
6. Be an active listener and listen more than you speak so your child feels heard and understood
7. Show empathy and understanding of your child’s inner world and experience so they know they’re safe with you
8. Avoid giving unsolicited advice unless it’s absolutely necessary and explicitly requested so they feel trusted and admired
9. Control your need to control the situation so they learn to manage their own experience rather than rely on you to fix things

Build a more trusting and secure relationship

Of course handling a child with an eating disorder is tricky. “In every case, it’s a matter of tuning in and personalizing treatment,” says Rebecca. “But the common theme is helping the parent and child build a more trusting, secure relationship in which the parent can care for the child, and the child can receive that care and feel safe enough to eat.” 

When parents feel confident, kids sense safety rather than fear. When we calm down, they calm down. Of course, they may still struggle, but you can handle their feelings without becoming part of an anxious relational pattern. 

“If you think about it, the fundamental action of feeding your child is to want to meet their needs,” says Rebecca. “And when that doesn’t happen, it can feel like you were unsuccessful in doing the very thing you want to do most. Of course that creates anxiety for parents, which can be transmitted to the child” 

But when you learn your triggers and regulate your emotional responses to your child’s eating behaviors, you’ll meet your child’s deepest hunger for safety and a secure relationship with you. This will allow you to influence and motivate eating disorder recovery.

That’s what happened to Angela. “All this time I was unaware of how much my anxiety was affecting her eating,” she says. “Now that I see it, I’m feeding our relationship first. When I get frustrated about meals, I go back to our relationship and usually find the issue there rather than what’s on the plate.”