Dina,
I feel like I am getting in a little over my head trying to answer your post. If you haven't already, you should probably speak to someone who is an expert on children and eating disorders. I certainly am not. I do think the story of our struggle with my son has similarities to your struggle with Mindy, although our struggle was not over food and eating, so I will write a little more about that.
My 17 year old son, who I wrote about in an earlier post, has various learning and psychological difficulties that work together to make things difficult for him. However, despite his various learning and psychological difficulties, he is incredibly smart and is particularly talented in mathematics (his learning disabilities are in the area of language/speaking and writing). He basically taught himself much of what there is to know about arithmetic before starting kindergarten.
He got through the early years of school on brains. He always had social difficulties, and I dreaded the calls from the principal telling me about another fight or another problem, but he was way more advanced than the other kids when it came to reasoning and analytical thinking. He did have trouble learning to read, but he finally learned at the age of eight. However, once he learned to read, he was fine in that area. I recently ran into one of his elementary school teachers and she told me that he was one of the brightest kids she ever had in her classroom.
The problem came with homework assignments, particularly assignments that involved writing. He could not or would not do them on his own and we starting sitting with him, "helping" him do them and forcing him through them. This got worse and worse every year as the assignments got more difficult. In third grade, I dreaded Tuesday nights (I still remember the night) when he had to use each of his spelling words in a sentence. It was a two or three hour ordeal to get him to write 10 or 12 sentences. In fourth grade, book reports became week long battles. By seventh grade, our relationship with him was defined by our effort to get him to do his homework and do as well in school as we knew he could do. We saw his future riding on how he did in school and we wanted the best for him. To me, it sounds something like your battles with your daughter over food.
In the middle of seventh grade, we got a call from the school saying that he was talking about suicide. I have been through few things as awful in my life as thinking that my child might take his own life. Even my husband's bout with cancer was not that bad. We immediately took him in for a psychological evaluation. He had been evaluated several times previously and had been in counseling for a while when he was younger, but at that point he was not seeing anyone.
Counseling with a child generally involves the entire family because the child's issues are almost always tied up with the family's issues. The first thing the counselor told us was to get totally uninvolved in his homework. He told us that our son needed his parents to be people he could trust and talk to, and that was much more important than any grades in school. He needed to realize we loved him for who he was. We had to focus on him as a person, not him as a student. We pulled back and he started failing his classes. The counselor told us to stay out and we stayed out. He failed most of the second half of seventh grade and then several classes in eighth grde. He was given a social promotion to ninth grade, because he had failed so many classes in eighth grade that he could not get a regular promotion. We talked the school out of holding him back because his test scores were so high that it was clear he knew the content, even though he was failing the classes.
We moved him to private school for ninth grade, where at least they were more emotionally supportive than the public school (who kept blaming us because the homework was not done), but he continued to fail about half his classes, and we continued to follow the advice of the psychologist and stay out of it. When he turned 16, toward the end of 10th grade, my brilliant son dropped out of school. He took the GED (high school equivalency test) and without studying at all, scored in the 99th percentile on three of the five subtests and above the 90th percentile on the other two. His failing grades clearly had nothing to do with his ability.
Last September, at the age of 16, he started at the local community college (admission is automatic with a GED), and only signed up for the classes he really wanted to take -- all in computer science. Miracle of miracles, he passed everything he took in the fall. He got B's and C's, and he volunteered the information to us that he would have had A's and B's if he had done all the assignments, but at least he did enough to pass and get credit. He sounds as though he really wants to raise his grades this semester, and we are trying to be supportive of that while simultaneously not pressuring him to do so (not easy, believe me). It's the first time in years he has ever shown any interest in his own grades. He also started a computer business and is actually making some money.
If anyone had told, back when he was 12 years old and suicidal, that we were starting on a journey that still would not be resolved 5 years later, I think I would have been in total despair. However, we've been taking it one day at a time and I guess we will just need to continue taking it one day at a time.
The reason I went through that whole lengthy story is that I think there are probably some parallels between our experience with him and what you will go through to work out your daughter's eating difficulties. These things do not resolve themselves overnight. You stopped nagging her about her eating for a few days and the eating problems did not immediately go away; we stopped nagging our son about his homework and that problem also did not immediately go away. However, we have stopped the battles in our house and we do have a good relationship with our son now (considering the fact that he is 17). We hope that he will choose to realize his own potential, but we know that we cannot force him to do so.
Sorry for going on so long. Raising children is so much more difficult than I realized when I started out 17 years ago. All we can do sometimes is fumble our way through and hope we are doing the right thing. I know that some family members think that our son just needs more discipline. They advocated sending him to military school for ninth grade. Perhaps they were right, we will never know, all we can do is what our instinct and the experts we choose to consult tell us is right. I can tell you, that sitting there and doing nothing while he failed his classes, was more difficult than you can possibly imagine.
I have no idea if sitting there and doing nothing while your daughter eats is the right thing to do. As I said at the beginning of this post, I think you should consult an expert on childhood eating disorders. However, if it turns out to be what you need to do, then you will just have to do it.
|