Disordered Eating, Body Dissatisfaction, and Positive Youth Development: The Differential Impact of Gender and Natural Mentors

Introduction. Eating disorders and related symptoms, such as drive for thinness and body dissatisfaction, are a critical issue affecting adolescents. Their growing prevalence and long-term effect on development is cause for concern for parents and practitioners. The current study takes a positive youth development (PYD) approach to examine the resources that may moderate the effect of eating disorder symptomatology on youth PYD. In particular, we considered the contextual resource of natural mentors (DuBois & Silverthorn, 2005). Natural mentoring relationships refer to relationships between young people and adults they encounter within their daily lives through existing social networks. The presence of natural mentors in the lives of adolescents has been shown to influence developmental outcomes (e.g., DuBois & Silverthorn, 2005); however, no research has been conducted to examine the presence of natural mentors on adolescent eating disorder symptomatology and PYD.

Method. Therefore, using data from 839 youth in Grade 9 from the 4-H Study of PYD (Lerner et al., 2005), we conducted a MANOVA and hierarchical regression analyses to model the relationships among the presence of natural mentoring relationships, eating disorder symptomatology (bulimia, drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction), and a composite measure of the Five Cs of PYD (competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring). The sample was 72% European American and 60.3% female, with age M=15.01 years, SD=0.73 years.

Results. Our results indicated that natural mentoring relationships were negatively related to drive-for-thinness and body dissatisfaction scores, but positively related to PYD. Consistent with prior research on gender, we found that females reported higher levels of eating disorder symptomatology and body dissatisfaction, but also higher levels of PYD. We also found that natural mentors have a differential impact on the outcomes based on youth gender. Univariate testing indicated that the interaction between gender and natural mentoring relationships was significant for predicting body dissatisfaction [F(2,822) = 3.39, p<.05] and PYD [F(2,822) = 5.71, p<.01].

Conclusion. The results indicated that important non-parental adults had a generally positive impact on eating disorder symptomatology, body dissatisfaction, and PYD for males, but not for females. For example, the proportion of variance of PYD scores explained by natural mentors’ presence was more than double for males as compared to females (17% v 6%). However, the presence of a natural mentor did buffer the impact of drive for thinness on PYD only for females. Possible reasons for the complex relations among natural mentoring relationships, gender, and outcomes will be discussed.