This is the 2025 updated version.

The most effective treatment for eating disorders is family-based, and parents play an essential role. Yet most struggle to know what to do and how to do it.

With a wealth of practical examples and tips that have helped many tens of thousands of relieved parents, Eva Musby guides you through each stage of your son or daughter's recovery. She provides solace and confidence, while addressing the real-life questions that parents struggle with.

The practical and emotional strategies in every chapter rest on up-to-date knowledge distilled from published research, from families, and from therapists worldwide. These pages will boost your effectiveness with an excellent treatment team, and will also help you succeed when you don't have access to cutting-edge care. With her lived experience and that of the hundreds of parents she has coached, this book will empower you to be effective right away, from the first successful meal all the way through to recovery.

• Make meals work in spite of your child's resistance
• Deal with distress, inflexibility, exercise compulsion, bingeing and purging
• Don’t stop at weight-restoration – skilled support all the way to recovery
• What to say and what not to say in difficult situations
• Actively support your child all the way to recovery and prevent relapse
• Recognise the treatments that work and the ones that don’t
• Grow your own emotional resources

This book is recommended by experts on family-based treatment (FBT, or 'Maudsley'), the evidence-based approach recommended by all major health institutions. It is used by parents and clinicians alike.

CONTENTS

1. How this book can help you
2. How does an eating disorder affect you and your child?
3. Your part in diagnosis
4. Treatment: the essentials
5. What parents need to know about the causes of eating disorders
6. Practical steps in a first phase of treatment
7. How do you get your child to eat in spite of the eating disorder?
8. See the tools in action: mealtime scenarios
9. Free your child of fears and rules with exposure
10. The work towards full recovery and independence
11. Partners, friends, family and work: help or hindrance?
12. Which treatments work?
13. Powerful tools for well-being and compassionate connection
14. Love, no matter what: how to support your child with compassionate communication
15. How to build up your own resilience and wellbeing

Note: If the eating disorder you are dealing with doesn't involve food restriction, some of the practical tools might not apply to you. Most of the emotional ones will.