Mothers, Daughters and Eating Disorders

"When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child." -Sophia Loren, Italian Actress

After spending last term researching eating disorders at OSU and within other colleges and universities, this paper wasn't a completely new thought to me. The idea that was completely new, was this idea of the mother-daughter relationship, and its effects on eating disorders. Removing analysis from the individual, and instead using a systems analysis (in this case, the family system of mothers and daughters), I found to be an interesting method for examination. In simple summation, the theory, Inconsistent Nurturing as Control (INC) says that the needs for mothers to nurture and control creates an inconsistency in reward and punishment that only perpetuates the eating disorder of their daughter(s).

Moms need to nurture and control

I found this theory to be a bit frustrating, specifically as applied in this study. What really surprised me about this study was the limitations it imposed on itself, and the implications thereof. First, it only used 40 daughters. For a sample size that's looking to examine an essential paradigm across the world, that seems like an astonishingly small number of girls. Second, only 2.4% of them had a single-parent (in other words, one). With the US having over a quarter of its children being raised by single parents, you'd think they'd try to get a few more daughters with a single mother. Finally, they only asked the daughters for their perceptions of how mothers acted. This almost seems criminal for a study like this. I've heard some stories from kids and what their parents "did." It's often exaggerated and just plain wrong.

As for the theory itself, it seems to have both weaknesses and strengths. Despite the failures of this particular study, it should be fairly testable. It also could have great utility in helping mothers to be more aware and purposeful in their reward and punishment, especially when dealing with a daughter with eating disorders. I don't see this theory being too heuristic, mostly because of it's scope - it's very specific. Unlike some theories where the specificity seems valid, I feel like I theory such as this one could examine family units more broadly, especially when utilizing what is essentially the cause and effect of uncertainty in parenting from the perspective of a troubled child/teen. It could possibly encompass drug and alcohol abuse, and other minor disorders. 

Overall, I like what this theory is doing - taking diagnosis away from the individual, especially just biology, and instead looking at the environment(s) that created the disability.