Introduction:

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a complex eating disorder of multifactorial origin that primarily affects adolescents and young adults. Parents play a key role in providing support and guidance to their children, yet face emotional and practical challenges during the disease process.

Objective:

To understand experiences of parental coping with anorexia nervosa.

Material and Methods:

A narrative review was conducted of the evidence available in the last 10 years in the MEDLINE and CINAHL databases. The descriptors used were: "anorexia nervosa", "coping", "parents", "comprehension", and "experience" as a free term. All of them were combined through the boolean operators "OR" and "AND".

Results:

This study incorporates 13 articles examining parents' emotional impact, challenges in their relationship with their child and coping strategies employed.

Conclusions:

The parental experience of AN is complex and involves a range of emotional, cognitive and behavioural challenges. An understanding of these experiences is necessary to develop interventions to support parental coping with anorexia nervosa.

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