The most common stressful situation that a child can undergo today is, sadly, her parents’ divorce. The rising incidences of divorce among parents today have been seen to adversely affect their children in a number of ways, one of which is them falling victims to eating disorders.

The children find themselves unable to cope with the fact that the two people who till a little while ago were together the fulcrum around which their lives went on smoothly actually found things between them so difficult that they could not stay together.

In many cases, the children have been found to have an association of guilt arising out of their parents’ divorce. Such a feeling is, of course, totally unfounded, but who can explain that to a six or seven year old? The mental balance of such children can get affected, and they can easily fall victims of eating disorders.

Frequent Changing Schools and Eating Disorder

There are other stressful situations as well that can cause a child to come down with eating disorders. One such event could be the frequent changing of schools. Whenever a child has to change schools frequently, owing to whatever reason, it takes a heavy toll on her mental makeup.

Childhood and growing up can be a very tough experience if you have to constantly shift schools, for it means constantly shifting loyalties, changing friendships, having to adjust to new sets of fellow children all the time, all of which are not definitely very easy to handle.

Children can be really mean and nasty, and often it takes a while for a child to be able to ‘belong’ to a particular set of friends or peers. Frequent change in schools is a definite setback for such a bonding process. Children with a slightly weaker mental makeup can succumb to an eating disorder as the easiest way out of coping with such needless stress.

Overly Concerned Parents and Eating Disorders

In many instances, children who have parents that are constantly fussing over how they look succumb to eating disorders. In such instances, it is not really a mental escape mechanism, as eating disorders usually tend to be.

Children are usually constantly looking to parents for approval and a ‘pat on the back’. Therefore when the parents constantly keep pointing it out to them that they could be in better shape, the children go to extreme lengths to make sure that the parents do not get too much reason to point fingers at them all the time. This is how it starts off, and can, over times, also take on other mental aspects as well.

Another way a child can develop an eating disorder is if a parent is constantly fussing over her own appearance and weight and such physical attributes. Children are usually very sensitive, and any such comment by the parent, even if it is about her own weight and looks, can be misconstrued by the child as being an indirect pointer to her health. The end result is that the child starts, at a very early age, to eat very frugally, and this at a time when they should be taking in as much of nutritious food as possible.

Other Children and Eating Disorders

As mentioned earlier, children are very sensitive and impressionable. If a child has a friend or peer who is herself suffering from an eating disorder, there are strong chances that the child in question will develop an eating disorder herself.

It is very possible that such a child could be ‘tutored’ by the other child with the already existing eating disorder about the ‘good things’ that happen due to skipping meals, excessive dieting, or even purging (if the other child is suffering from bulimia).