I’m a big fan of reading and love to recommend books to my clients who have kids with eating disorders. Many of the books I suggest are not about eating disorders specifically. Rather, they relate to the larger systems and other conditions that contribute to disordered eating behaviors.
There are a lot of reasons for this, mainly that eating disorders are deeply misunderstood and it’s been difficult for authors to capture their complexity in books. As someone who recovered from an eating disorder, I’m intimately aware of the lack of diversity, sensitivity, and lived experience included in eating disorder narratives and resources.
Specifically, most of the books about eating disorders focus on “typical” anorexia, which affects just 6% of people with eating disorders. They also don’t address the complex interaction of attachment, trauma, gender, and neurodiversity that significantly affect eating disorder development, expression, and maintenance and the ways parents can balance their kids’ need for security and autonomy during eating disorder treatment.
Parenting books about eating disorders are limited. However, there are plenty of high-quality, validated books for parents who want to improve their relationship, influence, and ability to motivate kids to change.
I believe that educated, supported parents are the key to successful eating disorder treatment. If your child has an eating disorder, I recommend finding an eating disorder professional who will work directly with your child and keep you meaningfully engaged in treatment. Meanwhile, you can use books, podcasts, and parent coaching to learn how to provide a secure relational base and address issues like anxiety, neurobiology, and communication.
Here are a few of my favorite books:
📚If you need help with meals in eating disorder recovery
How to Nourish Your Child Through an Eating Disorder: A Simple, Plate-by-Plate Approach® to Rebuilding a Healthy Relationship with Food by Casey Crosbie and Wendy Sterling
Our culture has a disordered relationship with food and eating, making eating disorder treatment challenging for everyone. Many parents are told they need to help their child eat in a more regulated, healthy way. Yet it’s hard to know what that looks like. This book helps you understand basic nutrition principles and avoid the pitfalls of diet culture when feeding. Most of us misunderstand what a healthy plate looks like, so this book is essential for any parent struggling with how to feed and eat during eating disorder treatment and beyond.
📚If you’re interested in gentle parenting, but also rules
The 5 Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans by Aliza Pressman
It’s important when you have a child with an eating disorder to support them, build emotional regulation skills, and honor their autonomy. However, it’s also important to uphold rules, boundaries, and expectations around treatment and recovery. Balancing these elements is challenging, but this book breaks down the evidence-based principles of developmental psychology. It helps parents understand their role, build skills of reflection and improve emotional regulation. Importantly, it also helps you set rules and repair relational ruptures effectively.
📚If you want to work on your own relationship with food
Feed Yourself: Step Away from the Lies of Diet Culture and into Your Divine Design by Leslie Schilling
Few of us make it to adulthood without engaging in diet behaviors and developing unhealthy beliefs about bodies—our own and others’. This can complicate a child’s eating disorder recovery. Parents are never to blame for an eating disorder. Nonetheless, learning about how fear of food and fat has shaped our beliefs is important to helping a child recover. This book is a fast and simple exploration of diet culture’s myths and the truth about health.
Nourish: How to Heal Your Relationship with Food, Body, and Self by Heidi Schauster
Healing our relationship with our own bodies and food is deeply tied to identity and knowing ourselves. Rather than saying we need to have this all figured out before we start parenting, this book provides a clear and engaging view into how we can shift while actively parenting our children. It will help you trust your body and yourself when it comes to food and movement and prioritize emotional self-care and community.
📚If you feel as if you’ve lost yourself while trying to save your child
Too Much: A Guide to Breaking the Cycle of High-Functioning Codependency by Terri Cole
Codependency is a negative term that’s frequently used unfairly to describe parents facing a child’s health crisis. Your child’s eating disorder will require you to become heavily engaged in ways that other parents don’t. Finding the balance between healthy engagement in your child’s treatment without losing yourself to their eating disorder is a constant challenge. This book defines the difference between healthy engagement and codependence, and can help you find the best balance you can at each stage of your child’s treatment.
📚If you’re in power struggles with your child
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
I discovered this book when I was a business consultant, but it’s proven invaluable in supporting parents who have kids with eating disorders. I recommend it to all my logical, literal clients who struggle with emotionality and negotiating with a strong-willed child. It defines empathy and why it’s such a powerful tool when negotiating about anything that really matters to you. Eating disorders typically involve a lot of power struggles, and the methods in this book help my clients stay sturdy and supportive in explosive situations.
📚If you want to motivate your child to change their behavior
Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents by Eli R. Lebowitz
Anxiety is often a key driver of eating disorder behaviors, so this book and its program, called Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) is an excellent step-by-step approach for parents who have anxious kids with eating disorders. In fact, SPACE has been tested successfully in ARFID and I often extend it to use with all types of eating disorders. It’s the foundation of my SPACE-4ED course. This book walks you through the concept of “parental accommodation” of anxiety and how you can change your behavior to inspire and motivate your child.
📚If this is all too serious and you desperately need to laugh
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson
This is a book about the mental health struggles of being a woman, wife, mom, daughter, and human. It normalizes feeling horrible while providing hope and levity. This is the best book I’ve read about the ups and downs of mental health struggles, especially depression. Not only do I love this book, but when my daughter was in middle school she read it over and over. For several years, when I heard her giggling in her room there was a good chance she was reading this book. It’s compassionate and fun, deep and lighthearted.
📚If you want to re-wire your child’s brain
The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
This is one of my all-time favorite books for parents. It introduces the concept of neurobiology and how we influence our kids constantly, whether we mean to or not. The book is easy to read and understand and covers the essentials of parenting, helping our kids feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure. It includes stories, scripts, strategies, illustrations, and tips for handling kids in all sorts of situations at all ages. If you want to understand how your child is wired and how you can connect with them better, this is a great place to begin.
📚If you’re struggling with burnout from your child’s treatment
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski
Most of my clients are struggling with burnout, which is terrible for them, and also makes it hard for them to maintain the hard work of treatment. I’m a firm believer in putting your own oxygen mask on first, but of course that’s extremely difficult when your child has an eating disorder. This book offers a good description of burnout and practical suggestions for helping yourself as best you can. The true solution to burnout is better systems of support, and our culture is terrible about helping parents who have kids with eating disorders, but this book can help you do the best you can with the conditions in which we live.
📚If your child has big emotions and you want to help them get regulated
Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory-Based Strategies by Robyn Gobbel
Kids with eating disorders often have big emotional outbursts that can be overwhelming and terrifying for parents to handle. This book explains what happens in kids’ brains when they freak out and how parents can reconnect and help them regulate their emotions with our support. There’s a really helpful metaphor that can be useful when navigating meltdowns. The author does a lot of work with neurodiversity and trauma, so this book is particularly helpful if your child is struggling with either or both of those conditions.
📚If you need help accepting your child’s weight
Diet-Proof Your Daughter: A Mother’s Guide to Raising Girls Who Have Happy, Healthy Relationships with Food & Body by Amelia Sherry
Many women struggle with disordered eating and then find themselves raising daughters who do the same. This compassionate guide accepts that when we struggle with food and body issues, watching our daughter’s body change can trigger a lot of emotion. Our own histories can interfere with raising our daughters to accept and love themselves as they are. Using a unique framework, you’ll learn how to incorporate a non-diet approach to healthy eating and wellness in your family.
Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith
Weight stigma and anti-fat bias are key drivers of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors. Most of us have negative feelings about fat due to centuries of its vilifications. This book reviews the myths and truths about weight, fat, and health, and gives parents helpful information that will shift your beliefs and attitude towards fat. Fat acceptance and a non-diet approach to health is vital to your child’s self-acceptance and recovery from an eating disorder.
These are just a few of the books I frequently recommend. You can see a list of more of my favorite books here.
Personalized Book Recommendations
Do you have a situation that’s not addressed above? I’d be happy to send you personalized book recommendations. If you’re interested, drop me a note:
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Not Sure Yet? No Problem!
Let’s keep in touch!
email newsletter: Parenting tips & information
Free Download: How To Parent A Child With An Eating Disorder
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