How Our Moms' Impact Eating Disorders

Eating is one of the most natural parts of life, yet it’s surprisingly easy for things to go off track, especially when close relationships come into play. One of the most influential connections when it comes to shaping eating habits is the mother-daughter relationship. This bond can mold, influence, and even disrupt the way daughters relate to food. Let’s dive into a few key areas where this relationship can play a major role in eating disorders, particularly focusing on the Oedipal stage, feeding practices, and body talk.

The Oedipal Stage and the Mother-Daughter Bond

To understand how mothers and daughters can influence each other when it comes to disordered eating, it helps to look at how their relationship develops over time. One area that experts often focus on is Freud’s Oedipal stage. This stage is when daughters start trying to separate from their mothers and become their own person, but this process is generally tougher for girls than for boys. Moms tend to blur boundaries more with their daughters than their sons, which can lead to controlling or possessive behavior. Daughters, in turn, can become a kind of extension of their mothers, who project their own dreams, fears, and ideas about femininity onto them.

At this time, girls are trying to figure out their own identities. While they need to break away from their mothers to become independent, they also find themselves identifying with their moms as fellow women. This creates tension, especially during puberty, when physical changes and battles for control (like over their bodies) come into play. Daughters often feel torn between relying on their moms and pushing them away. This struggle for independence can carry on into the teenage years, as daughters seek to break free while moms grapple with their own unresolved feelings about separation and loss.

Interestingly, food often becomes a symbol in this relationship. By controlling what they eat or how their bodies look, daughters can express the complicated dynamics they have with their moms. Food becomes a way to seek care while also resisting it, and dieting might be used to either satisfy their mother’s expectations or compete with her. In some cases, binge eating can serve as an emotional escape from feelings of rage, tension, or loss in the mother-daughter relationship. Purging, on the other hand, acts as a way to release these emotions.

Research backs up these ideas. For instance, Vázquez-Velázquez and their team found that daughters with anorexia often struggle with either identifying with or rebelling against their mothers. In normal development, girls would pick up traits from their moms as part of becoming their own person, but for those with anorexia, the eating disorder might be the only way they can assert their individuality.

Ogden and colleagues also found similar patterns. Daughters were more likely to restrict their eating when their mothers didn’t feel secure in their own independence. Both the mother and daughter tended to focus on projecting their issues onto one another. This, in turn, led daughters to feel dissatisfied with their bodies. When mothers struggled with their own sense of autonomy and projected that onto their daughters, it created a cycle of restrained eating and body dissatisfaction.

Feeding Practices and Eating Disorders

The relationship between mothers and daughters can have a big impact on eating behaviors, but the way mothers handle feeding is just as influential. Many mothers with eating disorders tend to be overly focused on their child's body shape, weight, and appearance—especially with their daughters. They often worry about their kids gaining weight from eating, and these concerns are tied to their own experiences and values. In some cases, this can even lead to moms wanting their kids to follow low-calorie diets.

Research shows that mothers with a history of eating disorders are more likely to face challenges when it comes to feeding their children. This might include limiting their child's food intake early on, or using food as a reward or distraction rather than just for nutrition. These mothers also tend to struggle with finding a balance between worrying about their child’s weight and knowing how to feed them properly. Some exert strict control over what and how much their kids eat, which can stem from their own confusion and misconceptions about nutrition.

Another issue is that some of these mothers try to avoid dealing with food altogether. They might feel uncomfortable with feeding their kids, and this discomfort can extend to situations outside the home, like eating out. This often leads to a lack of variety in their children's diets, which can result in inadequate nutrition.

A study by Stein and colleagues found that kids, especially daughters, of mothers with eating disorders tend to develop concerns about their own shape, weight, and eating habits by the age of 10. While their behaviors weren’t as extreme as those with diagnosed eating disorders, they showed a clear tendency towards dietary restraint and an overemphasis on weight in their self-esteem.

Conflicts around feeding can also start as early as infancy. For some mothers with eating disorders, mealtime becomes a power struggle. At just 1 year old, babies may experience distress and non-compliance because their moms are too focused on controlling how and when they eat. By the time the kids reach 5, this struggle often turns into a battle over how much food the child is allowed to eat. These early conflicts can set the stage for unhealthy eating habits and emotional issues around food.

All in all, a mother’s own eating behaviors and beliefs about food heavily shape how they feed their children—and these dynamics are especially impactful on daughters.

Body Talk and Its Impact

The way mothers talk about weight, body image, and food with their daughters plays a major role in shaping their daughters' relationship with these issues. Studies have shown that parental influence—especially comments from mothers about weight—are closely linked to kids’ concerns about their own weight and body shape. One study even found that mothers with eating disorders were much more likely to make negative comments during mealtimes, but not during other activities like play, highlighting how mealtime can become a source of tension.

In fact, comments about a child’s weight were found to be one of the strongest predictors of their concerns about weight and shape. These comments often led to dieting behaviors, with daughters being more affected by body image, self-esteem, and fears of gaining weight than sons.

As girls hit adolescence, a time when they’re more vulnerable to body image issues and disordered eating, mothers continue to have a big influence. Hart and colleagues looked at how body-related conversations between mothers and daughters can affect a girl’s body image and eating habits. They found that both positive and negative “body talk” could have harmful effects, leading to more body dissatisfaction. Interestingly, they suggested that moms should actually try to limit how much they talk about body image with their daughters altogether.

This is important because other research has shown that girls who feel most negative about their bodies during early adolescence are more likely to develop eating problems down the road. So, while it’s natural for moms to want to help their daughters navigate these issues, it's important to be mindful of how and how often body-related topics come up in conversation.

Wrapping Up

There’s no doubt that the mother-daughter relationship holds a lot of power when it comes to shaping a daughter’s relationship with food. From early developmental stages to feeding practices and body talk, mothers can deeply influence their daughter’s eating habits, sometimes in ways that lead to disordered eating. By understanding these dynamics, it’s easier to recognize the role they play in eating disorders and find healthier ways to navigate them. For those working to support young women with eating disorders, it’s important to acknowledge the impact of the mother-daughter bond and address it as part of the healing process.