Awareness week puts focus on eating disorders

Silver Spring author urges greater attention for children inside and outside area schools

‘‘Our county is very affluent, very upward-mobile, very appearance-conscious, and eating disorders are going off the charts,” she said.

Goldberg has co-authored two books about eating disorders, including the most recent, ‘‘My Thin Excuse: Understanding, Recognizing, and Overcoming Eating Disorders.”

The national awareness week, Feb. 25 to March 3, marked the 20th year of education, observance and focus on anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

People suffering from anorexia nervosa starve themselves and suffer from excessive weight loss, while those suffering from bulimia nervosa binge on food before purging, often using laxatives or over-exercise to get rid of food and calories more quickly.

Goldberg said parents, educators, pediatricians and the media need to work together to combat the diseases. She said the influences on diet and ideas of self-perception start at home.

‘‘Kids grow up seeing their mother exercising and being very concerned with their appearance [become more] preoccupied with weight,” Goldberg said.

Susan Soulé, a health teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, said that the most engaging conversation in the classroom relates to the topic of eating disorders.

‘‘With some classes you can get the conversation to where [the students are asking], ‘What is it about girls that feel that they have to be perfect?’ or ‘What are comments made in society among males?’” Soulé said. ‘‘The key thing about eating disorders is that we are very much aware that this is in the public eye now.”

Soulé said that students have even offered themselves as examples in classrooms of those who have suffered from the disease. That approach often helps others feel a connection to it.

Conversations involving the illnesses are slightly less specific and personal in middle school, but eating disorders are covered in grades 6 through 8.

Julie Benner, a health teacher at Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring, said students in middle school learn the basics including the definitions, symptoms and health problems associated with eating disorders.

‘‘With our health curriculum, we have a very full plate and we’d love to give it more attention, but we’re tight with our time,” Benner said.

She said students were getting just the right amount of information and resources to get help for themselves or their friends.

Despite time constraints, Goldberg said that she would like more time spent on the topic in schools. She said many of the National Eating Disorders Week events involved college campuses, when the discussion should begin at the end of elementary school.

‘‘Every school should have a program, not just in their health classes, because they have great health teachers, but that may not be their specialty area,” she said.

However, Michelle Turner, a Wheaton parent of six children who have gone through the Montgomery County Public Schools system and taken the health classes, said the schools can only do so much.

‘‘School have so much that they are expected to do — trying to get kids to pass state tests, local tests, be ready to apply for college,” Turner said. ‘‘How much more can schools be expected to do? There has got to be more coming from the home. The parent, who is seeing the daughter every day, ought to be noticing that their child is losing too much weight or getting too thin.”

Overall, she said she thought Montgomery County was doing all it could to address the topic in the classroom.

‘‘I know in the health classes that this has been covered and from what I’ve heard from my kids, it’s been a relatively good presentation,” she said.