Stop Before You Hurt the Kids: Communicating Self-Control and Self-Negation in Femininity, Mothering, and Eating Disorders

Abstract

Via authoethnographic analysis of our lives as eating-disordered mothers, we argue that the cultural expectations of self-control and self-negation in the roles of woman and mother, communicated to women from their childhood and throughout their lives, have complicated the ability to recover from eating disorders and may even exacerbate them. Messages suggesting to mothers that they simply stop the eating-disordered behaviors to avoid damaging their children have little utility and function communicatively to reinforce problematic expectations.

Keywords:

• eating disorders
• communication
• social expectations
• motherhood
• femininity
• culture
• self-control
• self-negation