Understanding Gendered Realities: Mothers and Father Roles in Family Based Therapy for Adolescent Eating Disorders
- PDF / 645,730 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 0 Downloads / 147 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Understanding Gendered Realities: Mothers and Father Roles in Family Based Therapy for Adolescent Eating Disorders Jennifer Scarborough1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Eating disorders are serious and life threatening illnesses that typically present during adolescence. The current recommended treatment for adolescents diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa is Family-Based Therapy. Family-Based Therapy is a manualized treatment that empowers parents to temporarily take control of the eating disorder symptoms. However, literature often discusses the role of parents in treatment, yet the reality is that mothers are often tasked with the difficult role of interrupting symptoms for their adolescent, while fathers remain absent or, at best, a support to the mother. By removing the gender from literature, we are failing to examine ways to better support mothers and engage fathers in family-based treatment. Through the use of case studies and limited literature, this paper will examine how these mothering and fathering expectations surface in treatment, how they may be perpetuated by professionals, and the impact that these gendered expectations may have on mothers and fathers. Keywords Eating disorders · Family therapy · Gender roles · Mothering · Fathering · Family based therapy Eating disorders (EDs) are serious, life threatening illnesses that have a significant morbidity and mortality rate (Arcelus et al. 2011). Given the severity of these disorders, the lack of motivation to recover, and the adolescents minimizing of their seriousness, it is no surprise that parents become involved in the attempt to restore their child to wellness. Because EDs typically emerge in the adolescent period, the current recommended treatment for adolescents with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa is Family-Based Therapy (FBT) (Lock 2015). FBT attempts to empower parents to support their child in restoring the child’s health by means of re-feeding and/or the cessation of symptoms. In FBT, parents act in a way similar to nursing staff in an inpatient unit by portioning and supervising meals and monitoring exercise (Le Grange and Lock 2011, p. 230). In the literature, the term parents is widely used. However, fathers typically do not attend treatment, leaving mothers in the lone position of intensive caregiving for their ill adolescent (Hughes et al. 2017; Phares et al. 2010). The use of the word parents hides gender, yet the impact of gender on the differing * Jennifer Scarborough [email protected] 1
Faculty of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University, 120 Duke Street West, Kitchener, ON N2H 3W8, Canada
expectations of men and women who have an adolescent with an ED cannot be ignored. Fathers have typically been absent from ED literature and mothers have historically been blamed for ED onset (Ruskay Rabinor 1996; Vander Ven and Vander Ven 2003). To date, there has been a dearth of literature that looks at the impact of parent gender on how FBT is carried
Data Loading...
