Something my husband and I got our girls into was bellydancing. We have weekly ‘girl’s night out’ dates to a bellydancing class that teaches the beauty of every shape body. I teach a beginning class and have noticed young women (mainly young. My average class age is about 15-25) becoming more and more aware of their bodies and how beautiful they are no matter how they look. I had one girl who never looked up, never flirted ever. She took one full session with my dancing partner and me and now she’s flirting on stage and dancing beautifully. I really hope my daughters see that despite the fact that I go through phases where I hate the way my body is shaped, I still love it even though I’m ‘heavy’ and they learn the same thing.

The problem that I’m running into is that the really smart people can’t agree what to call eating disorders in children or how to measure it. From what I’ve read, adult tests seem to focus on behaviour and less on intent – I just read an article on something called the Cheat – a child friendly version of the Eating Attitude Test. It studied 3, 500 kids between the ages of 8 and 13. They showed that roughly the same percentage of kids scored ‘anorexic’ within the cheat as adults did within the eat! Even uglier, hey?

I’m going to keep reading and I’ll update this page with any articles I find particularly interesting. I hope that you can find some of these articles online – I’m lucky enough to be able to access them through my University’s library….

http://journals.lww.com/jaacap/pages/articleviewer.aspx?year=1988&issue=09000&article=00004&type=abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8340308

Once again, that was a really great article! Thanks for writing it!!!!

that said, I just get BORED with the culture obsession about weight; not upset, just “can we move on?”

Anorexia and bulimia are unfortunately common eating disorders among teenagers. They are not reserved for adults, and the way society is today it is not surprising that children are young as 6 would be diagnosed with an eating disorder.

Absolutely tragic, isn’t it?

As for children as young as 6 being diagnosed with eating disorders, I have to tell you that I am always concerned when children receive a diagnosis normally reserved for adults. Kids as young as 6 are being diagnosed with depressive disorders and getting prescriptions for anti-depressants. Kids as young as 6 (who don’t exercise, who loathe drinking water and whose parents give them energy drinks to take to school) are being diagnosed with ADHD and getting prescriptions for Ritalin (worst drug ever).

Children are (amongst many other things) perfect mirrors. When a little one is diagnosed with an eating disorder, I question whether it is in fact, a pathology, or a manifestation of his/her parents’ eating disorder(s). The tragic thing is that the next logical argument is to make removing these children from their homes a part of the treatment. Should children really be condemned to the Foster Care lottery (if you lose, you get to go to a Foster House of Horror) because their parent(s) are sick??? But can they be treated as long as they remain in that sort of environment??

Now please don’t get me started on ADHD or childhood depressive episodes…;-)