Parental bonding and eating disorders: A systematic review

• Women with eating disorders experience deficiencies in maternal and paternal bonding.
• Few studies consider the mediators between bonding and disorder severity.
• Problem avoidance, defectiveness, and vulnerability mediate this relationship.
• Methodological limitations are somewhat widespread across reviewed studies.

This article systematically reviewed studies of parental bonding in people with eating disorders. MEDLINE, PsychINFO, EMBASE and CINAHL were searched to identify studies that compared parental bonding in people diagnosed with an eating disorder relative to non-clinical controls. Twenty-four studies were identified. Women with eating disorders typically reported lower parental care and higher parental protection compared to non-clinical, but not psychiatric, controls. Interestingly, a modest number of studies found that these relationships were mediated by avoidant problem solving style and several schemas from the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ; Schmidt, Joiner, Young, & Telch, 1995). While there are methodological limitations associated with the reviewed studies, they do offer some support for the proposal that difficulties in parent–child relationships predispose women to eating disorders and other psychiatric diagnoses.