Reply to When a "good thing" happens to your teen that you did not want to happen...

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

Reply to "When a "good thing" happens to your teen that you did not want to happen..."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP, congrats to your daughter.  It sounds like you feel like me - MUCH ambivalence and often concern about the path your child is following right now.  I think I know exactly how you feel. I feel this way constantly. The effects of it are huge on the family since we have only 2 kids.

DD just left yesterday for her ballet SI too.  She has been to others and I completely understand your concern about disordered eating.  Some advice has been given here already about letting your DD follow her dreams for now so to speak, so I will focus on what we found with summers away and food.   We focus on the food as fuel. I have had many frank conversations about DD and this concern. There was a period when she was 14 where I worried. I let her know I was watching to make sure she was getting the fuel she needed. A dancer friend who became bulimic back in the 80s due to a crazy teacher told me that that's what would have worked for her.

I also talked to her extensively about social media because that honestly caused more of a problem with eating than ballet!  D@mn Pinterest. We made it through that patch.

Honestly, most programs keep a check on it and try to encourage healthy eating. However, there are teachers out there, trained in the 70s and 80s, who can make comments which definitely affect the dancers. That is one area to check in with your daughter on whenever she has new teachers.

DD has always had nutrition talks during the summers- there has been only one that seemed to affect her back when she was 13/14- the nutritionist was promoting veganism, which is not at all right for the constant strain on a dancer's body from what I can tell. This occurred right here in DC and I'll leave it to you to guess the major school with a company attached where it occurred. I resolved that by telling DD she could try it for 1 week and she had to find recipes that would give her the nutrition she needed. Needless to say that was overwhelming for her and she gave up 3 days in.  I told her that I'm sure you could do it healthfully, but that you would really need to be able to afford a personal chef to do so!

Anyway, I miss her terribly and there were some tears last night while Skyping for her so I will be checking in some this week to make sure it's going well after the first day jitters.  It is a tremendous learning experience for them on all levels. I bet your daughter will do well. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics