The Parent-Child Relationship and Eating Behavior(Eating Behavior and Mind-Body Balance)

Abstract

Children tend to show symptoms related to "eating." The causes for eating-related symptoms in children are often associated with the parent-child relationship. The author recently studied the parent-child relationship in connection with the eating behavior, taking intp consideration the current social background in Japan.The subjects of this study were 14 children (aged under then years) who visited our department with the chief complaint of one of various kinds of eating disorder. The psychological backgrounds of these children were analyzed. In a half of them, there had been troubles with food intake already in the early infantile period ; the addition of parent-child mental conflicts to these disturbances resulted in the onset of eating disorder. In the remaining half of the children, no eating-related symptoms had occurred in the early infantile period, but a crisis in the parent-child relationship had appeared at some occasion and eating disorder was induced as a reaction to that stress.Before the onset of eating disorder, all children had been more or less controlled by their parents (or the desires of the children had often been refused by their parents). After the onset of eating disorder, the children in turn controlled the behavior of their parents.In the familes of these children, the educational, physical and self-sufficient aspects of eating had been emphasized at the dining table, with little attention paid to the emotional exchange among family members at the dining table. Thus, the mental aspect of eating had been narrowed in these families.This state of dining table nehavior can distort the parent-child and familial relationships under the influence of the current social factors ; it makes the dining table a place where children feel heavy pressure, suffering, passive status and frustration.The questionnaire survery about anorexia nervosa also disclosed that an unsatisfactory emotional parent-child exchange is relfected in the dining table behavior. Such an ambivalent situation between parent and child produces an ambivalent parent-child relationship, resulting in ambivalent, morbid eating habits.