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Volume 2 Supplement 1

Proceedings of the 2014 Australia and New Zealand Academy for Eating Disorders (ANZAED) Conference: Driven Bodies Driven Brains

Does low parental warmth and monitoring predict disordered eating in Australian female and male adolescents?

Journal of Eating Disorders volume 2, Article number: O29 (2014) Cite this article

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Objectives

To investigate the predictive power of low parental warmth and monitoring at age 13-14 years and their individual, combined and interactive effects on disordered eating (DE) outcomes at age 15-16 years.

Method

Participants included 1391 (684 females) adolescents and their parents. The parents completed data on parenting practices and the adolescents provided data on the drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction and bulimia EDI subscales.

Results

Low monitoring in girls was significantly associated with bulimia, whereas for boys none of the individual parenting styles were significantly related to any of the EDI subscales. For females, exposure to both low warmth and monitoring was associated with a 4.5,5.8 and 6.5 fold increase in the odds of reporting body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimia, respectively [80%,74% and 59% of which was attributable to the additive interaction of both parental risk factors respectively]. For males, exposure to both low warmth and monitoring was associated with a 2.5 fold increase in the odds of bulimic behaviour,41% of which was attributable to the joint action of both parenting risk factors.

Conclusions

Whereas for females a neglectful-disengaging parenting style revealed a range of DE symptoms, for boys such a parenting style was predictive mainly of bulimic behaviours.

This abstract was presented in the Parental Roles in Prevention and Support stream of the 2014 ANZAED Conference.

Author information

Affiliations

  1. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    • Isabel Krug
    •  & Primrose Letcher

  2. School of Psychology, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

    • Anisha Sorabji
    • , Ross King
    •  & Craig Olsson

  3. Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia

    • Craig Olsson

  4. The University of Melbourne (Paediatrics and Psychological Sciences), Melbourne, Australia

    • Craig Olsson

  5. The Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

    • Craig Olsson

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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Isabel Krug.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Krug, I., Sorabji, A., King, R. et al. Does low parental warmth and monitoring predict disordered eating in Australian female and male adolescents?. J Eat Disord 2, O29 (2014) doi:10.1186/2050-2974-2-S1-O29

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Keywords

  • Disorder Eating
  • Disorder Eating
  • Joint Action
  • Body Dissatisfaction
  • Parenting Style

Journal of Eating Disorders

ISSN: 2050-2974