We stood in the hospital hallway, just outside her daughter's room. Inside, her child lay connected to a cardiac monitor, her heart rate hovering at a dangerously low 38 beats per minute, a complication of her anorexia nervosa. The mother was exhausted and scared. Her daughter had survived leukemia years earlier. Now, facing this different kind of medical crisis, she said something I'll never forget: "Cancer was easier than this."

She explained that with cancer, there had been meals delivered by neighbors, clear treatment protocols, and community support. People had rallied around them. But with the eating disorder, she felt paralyzed by shame. The shame kept her from telling extended family, from reaching out to friends, from informing the school.

Most parents don't directly ask me if they caused their child's eating disorder. They don't have to. I hear it in the careful way they describe their own struggles with food. I sense it when they wonder aloud whether their own anxiety somehow planted seeds that grew into this illness. Or when they replay the family vacation when their child first started skipping meals, searching for the moment when it all went wrong.

Here's what the research tells us: eating disorders are multifactorial conditions with complex origins that we're still working to fully understand. They emerge from an........

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