Where Do I Start? A Parent’s Guide to Helping Your Child Begin Eating Disorder Recovery
Quick Start Guide To Eating Disorder Recovery
After you realize that your child may have an eating disorder, it’s common to feel overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. Many parents wonder, “How do I help my child with an eating disorder?” or “What should I do if my child is showing signs of disordered eating?” You might even question whether you’re overreacting, or hope that it’s just a phase that will pass on its own. But if you’re noticing sudden changes in your child’s eating habits, weight, or behaviors around food and body image, it’s important to act sooner rather than later.
Early intervention can make a significant difference in recovery. You don’t have to wait until things reach a crisis point before getting help. It’s always better to seek help early, even if it turns out to be nothing, than to wait and risk missing the signs of a serious eating disorder that needs immediate attention.If you’re not sure where to begin, this guide offers practical steps to help you support your child as they start their recovery journey.
Don’t Wait for Your Child to Be Ready to Start Eating Disorder Treatment
One of the hardest parts of helping a child with an eating disorder is knowing that your child may not feel ready to recover. It’s normal for kids and teens to feel ambivalent about giving up the eating disorder. In many cases, they may not even believe there’s a serious problem. Denial, shame, and fear often play a big role in eating disorders. For some children, the eating disorder offers them secondary benefits like a sense of control, numbing of painful emotions, or helping them cope with anxiety, perfectionism, or low self-worth. So it’s no wonder they don’t want to give it up.
It’s also important for parents to understand how malnutrition itself affects the brain. When a child is malnourished, it becomes much harder for them to think clearly and regulate emotions. Their insight into the eating disorder may be impaired because their brain isn’t getting the fuel it needs to function well. This is one reason why early intervention and consistent nourishment are so crucial. As physical health begins to stabilize, a child’s cognitive flexibility and openness to recovery often improve.
Waiting for your child to recognize how serious the situation is can delay lifesaving care. As a parent, you may need to take the lead early on. You don’t have to wait for your child to feel motivated to start treatment. In fact, it’s very common for parents to initiate the first steps by setting up appointments, establishing treatment providers, and implementing structure, even while their child protests or resists. Motivation to recover often comes later, once consistent nourishment helps stabilize both the body and mind.
Step 1: Build a Multidisciplinary Eating Disorder Treatment Team
A treatment team should include, at minimum, a therapist and dietitian.
Once you’ve recognized that your child needs help, the next step is to build a comprehensive eating disorder treatment team. Eating disorders are complex illnesses that affect both the body and the mind, which is why a team approach is considered the gold standard in treatment. No single provider can meet all of your child’s needs, so it’s important to assemble professionals with different areas of expertise who can work together.
Therapist
You will need a therapist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders. Not every therapist has specific training in this area, so don’t be afraid to ask questions. You’ll want to know what type of training and experience they have, and what therapeutic approaches they use. Look for providers who use evidence-based treatments for eating disorders such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), or Family-Based Treatment (FBT). It’s also helpful to ask what guiding principles they follow in their work. Many eating disorder specialists incorporate frameworks like Health at Every Size (HAES), Intuitive Eating, and Body Neutrality, which emphasize healing your child’s relationship with food and body, rather than focusing on weight loss or appearance.
A skilled therapist will work with your child to explore the emotional, psychological, and behavioral patterns that have kept them stuck in the eating disorder. They’ll help your child develop new coping skills, challenge rigid beliefs, and work toward more flexible and values-based behaviors.
Registered Dietitian
Nutrition counseling is a crucial part of eating disorder recovery. It’s important to work with a Registered Dietitian (RD or RDN) who specializes in eating disorders. Be aware that anyone can call themselves a “nutritionist,” but dietitians have undergone extensive education, supervised training, and state licensure. An eating disorder dietitian will help create a structured meal plan designed to support your child’s nutritional rehabilitation, stabilize their eating patterns, restore weight if needed, and gradually help them challenge any fear foods or rigid rules that have developed.
Medical Provider
Because eating disorders can have serious medical complications, it’s essential to have a medical provider involved who understands the unique physical risks associated with disordered eating. Unfortunately, many pediatricians and general practitioners receive little specialized training in eating disorders. If your child’s primary doctor isn’t familiar with these issues, your therapist or dietitian may be able to recommend a physician with eating disorder expertise.
Psychiatrist
In some cases, you may also want to involve a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist can evaluate whether medication may be helpful in addressing co-occurring issues such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, or trauma, which are often present alongside an eating disorder. While medication is not a primary treatment for eating disorders themselves, it can sometimes provide important symptom relief as part of a larger treatment plan.
Step 2: Determine The Right Level of Care
After meeting with these providers, you may hear the recommendation that your child needs a “higher level of care.” This can feel overwhelming at first, but it’s important to remember that higher levels of care are often recommended to provide more intensive monitoring, accountability, and support when outpatient treatment isn’t enough to keep your child safe. Your child’s treatment team can help you assess which level of care is appropriate based on their medical stability, eating disorder behaviors, psychological functioning, and readiness for change.
Outpatient Care
Individual therapy, nutrition counseling, medical monitoring, and/or psychiatric support.
Client lives at home and attends scheduled appointments (typically 1-3 times per week).
Appropriate for individuals who are medically stable and able to function in daily life with support.
Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP)
Structured program, usually 3-5 days per week for a few hours each day.
Includes group therapy, individual therapy, nutrition education, and meal support.
Designed for individuals needing more support than outpatient but still able to maintain some daily activities.
Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) / Day Treatment
Full-day treatment, typically 5-7 days per week.
Comprehensive care with multiple therapy groups, individual therapy, meal support, medical monitoring, and psychiatric care.
Patient returns home each evening.
Suitable for individuals needing daily intensive support but who are medically stable enough to live at home.
Residential Treatment
24/7 care in a live-in facility.
Provides intensive therapeutic support, medical and psychiatric care, and structured meals.
Appropriate for individuals who need a highly structured environment but do not require hospitalization.
Inpatient Hospitalization
24/7 medical stabilization in a hospital setting.
Focuses on managing acute medical complications (e.g., severe malnutrition, electrolyte imbalance, cardiac instability).
Short-term stabilization before transitioning to lower levels of care.
Step 3: Learn About Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size
Step three in supporting your child’s eating disorder recovery is to educate yourself on some of the guiding frameworks your child’s treatment team may be using including Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size (HAES). These principles can feel very different from the way many of us were taught to think about food, weight, and health, but they are central to helping your child heal.
Intuitive Eating is a non-diet approach that focuses on helping individuals rebuild trust with their bodies. Rather than following rigid food rules or external diet plans, Intuitive Eating teaches people to listen to their internal cues when making food choices. The goal is to move away from restriction, obsession, or fear-based eating, and instead foster a more balanced, flexible, and peaceful relationship with food.
Health at Every Size (HAES) is a weight-neutral approach to health that emphasizes behaviors over weight outcomes. It challenges the idea that weight loss should be the primary health goal, and instead promotes respectful care, body diversity, and joyful movement, as key to long-term health. This can feel very countercultural in a society that often links thinness with health. But for eating disorder recovery, it’s critical to separate weight from health and focus on healing behaviors instead of chasing a number on the scale.
For many parents, learning about Intuitive Eating and HAES means doing some unlearning too. We live in a culture that constantly reinforces diet mentality with messages about “good” and “bad” foods, portion control, calorie counting, or praising weight loss as an achievement. Even well-intentioned comments like “make healthy choices” or “watch your portions” can unknowingly reinforce diet culture thinking that fuels disordered eating patterns. It can be painful for parents to realize how deeply these ideas have been ingrained, especially if you yourself were raised in a household where weight and food were a constant focus.
But here’s the good news: you can learn alongside your child. Parents often tell us they’re surprised to discover how many subtle diet culture messages show up in their everyday language. Recognizing this is the first step toward change. By working to reframe your own beliefs about food, weight, and body image, you’re modeling the same flexibility and openness your child needs to develop in recovery.
Step 4: Learn How to Emotionally Support Your Child Through Recovery
Step four in helping your child recover from an eating disorder is learning how to provide emotional support, and this part can be especially challenging for parents. Eating disorder recovery often involves significant distress for your child as they begin to challenge rigid food rules, face fear foods, and let go of behaviors that once felt safe or comforting. It’s incredibly hard to watch your child struggle, and many parents wonder:
“How do I emotionally support my child during eating disorder recovery without making things worse?”
or
“What am I supposed to say to my child when they’re upset?”
It’s painful to watch your child suffer. As a parent, your natural instinct is to want to protect your child from discomfort, fix what’s wrong, or make the hard feelings go away. But in eating disorder recovery, learning to tolerate emotional distress is part of the work your child has to do. Recovery requires your child to face anxiety, fear, frustration, and uncertainty as they re-learn how to nourish themselves and challenge the eating disorder’s grip.
One of the most powerful tools you can use as a parent is validation. Validation means acknowledging your child’s emotional experience without trying to talk them out of it, minimize it, or fix it. It helps your child feel seen, heard, and supported, even when things are difficult. When parents respond with validation, it can lower the emotional intensity and help your child stay engaged in the recovery process.
For example, if your child is crying after a meal and says, “I feel so full, I can’t stand this,” a natural instinct might be to reassure them with, “You’re fine, you’re not even that full.” But a validating response might sound more like: “I hear you. It feels really uncomfortable to sit with that full feeling right now. And I’m proud of you for doing it anyway.”
Or if your child says, “I hate my body. I feel huge,” instead of replying, “Don’t say that, you’re beautiful,” you might say: “It’s painful to feel that way about your body. I can understand how hard that must feel right now.”
Validation doesn’t mean you agree with the eating disorder or allow unsafe behaviors. It simply means you’re acknowledging how your child feels, while still holding firm to the structure and boundaries they need to recover. Even simple statements like “I know this feels overwhelming right now” or “It’s okay to feel frustrated, I’m here with you” can go a long way.
These emotional validation skills can be difficult to learn, which is why we often post videos and advice in our Facebook group to help parents navigate all aspects of their child’s eating disorder recovery. You can join our community here.
Step 5: Understand That Recovery Is a Long-Term Process
One of the most important things for parents to understand about eating disorder recovery is that it takes time, and often far more time than anyone expects at the beginning. Many parents hope that once treatment starts, progress will happen quickly. But true recovery from an eating disorder is rarely a quick or linear process.
It’s very normal for recovery to unfold in waves. There may be stretches where your child seems to be doing well and is eating more freely, expressing motivation, or engaging in treatment, followed by periods where anxiety increases, old behaviors resurface, or progress seems to stall. This up-and-down pattern is part of the work. Eating disorders are deeply entrenched and untangling them takes repeated practice and patience.
Parents often ask: “How long does eating disorder recovery take?” While every person’s journey is different, it’s not unusual for recovery to take several months to even years. This doesn’t mean your child will be actively struggling for all that time, but healing a relationship with food, body image, and emotional regulation is a slow, complex process. For many kids, physical recovery (such as weight restoration or meal plan compliance) happens much sooner than full emotional or cognitive recovery.
It’s important to remember that setbacks are not a sign that treatment isn’t working, or that your child isn’t trying. Flare-ups or returns to old behaviors often signal that your child is facing new triggers, life transitions, or internal emotional struggles that still need support.
There will also be times when your child feels more motivated to engage in recovery, and other times when fear, shame, or exhaustion take over. This is part of the emotional process. The eating disorder may feel stronger some days than others, but with consistent support and structure, your child can learn to navigate those fluctuations without returning fully to old behaviors. Adjust your expectations in order to protect both you and your child. Knowing upfront that this process will take time allows you to pace yourself emotionally. It helps you celebrate small wins along the way, instead of constantly feeling like you’re not moving fast enough.
Final Thoughts: Don’t Wait to Act
So, if you suspect your child might have an eating disorder, or if your child has come to you asking for help, it’s important to take action quickly. You don’t need to wait for your child to fully recognize the problem or feel motivated to change before getting support in place. Early intervention can make a world of difference. And even if it turns out to be nothing, it’s far better to seek help early than to wait and risk missing the signs of a serious eating disorder. Recovery is possible, and your child doesn’t have to face this journey alone and neither do you.With the right support, healing can begin.
You Don’t Have To Do This Alone
Join our free Facebook group The Parent Support Network for Eating Disorder Recovery — a safe, compassionate space where you can connect with other parents, share experiences, and get expert guidance as you support your child’s healing journey. You don’t have to do this alone!