How to Help Your Child With an Eating Disorder: Replacing Control With Connection With Dr. Tom Wooldridge

Supporting a child or teen with an eating disorder can leave parents caught between the urgency to help them eat and the fear that increasing control will create more conflict around food.

In this episode, Dr. Marianne welcomes psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Tom Wooldridge to discuss how parents can help a child with an eating disorder by replacing control with connection. Drawing from his book, Ending the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder, Dr. Wooldridge offers a different way to understand eating disorders in children and teens, anorexia recovery, family dynamics, and the role of parents in eating disorder treatment.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

Dr. Marianne and Dr. Wooldridge discuss why weight restoration and nutritional rehabilitation are essential in anorexia treatment, but may not address everything happening beneath eating disorder behaviors. A young person may restore weight and normalize eating while still struggling with perfectionism, obsessive thinking, emotional regulation, or other patterns that contributed to the eating disorder. Understanding these underlying dynamics can be an important part of longer-term eating disorder recovery and relapse prevention.

They also explore how an eating disorder can sometimes function as a source of order, regulation, or safety when a child’s internal world feels overwhelming. Dr. Wooldridge explains how attachment and emotional safety can help us understand why moving away from anorexia, binge eating, or other eating disorder behaviors can feel threatening, even when a young person wants to recover.

PARENTS, CONNECTION & EATING DISORDER RECOVERY

When a child or teen has anorexia or another eating disorder, parents may feel frightened, frustrated, angry, or desperate to make their child eat. Dr. Wooldridge describes three important areas for parents supporting eating disorder recovery in children and adolescents: self-regulation, emotional attunement, and the ability to reflect on both their child’s internal experience and their own.

The conversation introduces mentalization, a way of becoming curious about the thoughts, feelings, fears, and needs that may be driving a child’s behavior rather than responding only to the behavior itself. For parents navigating anorexia treatment or adolescent eating disorder recovery, this can create space between the understandable urge to react and the ability to respond with greater connection and emotional attunement.

Dr. Marianne and Dr. Wooldridge also discuss perfectionism and eating disorders, family dynamics, and intergenerational patterns around food, weight, and body image. Parents may carry their own histories of dieting, body shame, weight stigma, trauma, or perfectionism. Recognizing what belongs to the parent and what belongs to the child can help interrupt the unconscious transmission of these patterns.

Importantly, replacing control with connection does not mean abandoning structure, nutritional rehabilitation, medical monitoring, or professional eating disorder treatment. Children and teens with anorexia and other eating disorders need appropriate treatment and a qualified care team. Connection provides an emotional foundation that can support that work.

ABOUT DR. TOM WOOLDRIDGE

Dr. Tom Wooldridge is a board-certified psychologist and psychoanalyst, founding dean of the School of Psychology at Golden Gate University, and an eating disorder specialist. His books include:

Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak

Ending the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder.

His work brings together eating disorder treatment, anorexia recovery, psychoanalytic therapy, attachment, family relationships, perfectionism, and the psychological factors underlying eating disorders.

EATING DISORDER & ARFID SUPPORT WITH DR. MARIANNE

If you are looking for an eating disorder therapist, ARFID therapist, anorexia therapist, or neurodivergent-affirming eating disorder therapy, Dr. Marianne Miller provides eating disorder therapy for clients in California and Washington, D.C. Her work includes support for anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, ARFID, autism, ADHD, and complex or long-term eating disorders.

Dr. Marianne also offers a self-paced ARFID & Selective Eating Course for adults with ARFID, parents and caregivers of children and teens with ARFID, and providers who want to learn more about neurodivergent-affirming ARFID treatment.

Visit Dr. Marianne’s website to learn more about eating disorder therapy in California, ARFID treatment, eating disorder recovery, parent support, and neurodivergent-affirming eating disorder care, or to explore the ARFID course and additional resources.