American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines: “For children and adolescents, the evidence indicates that family treatment is the most effective intervention. In methods modeled after the Maudsley approach, families become actively involved, in a blame-free atmosphere, in helping patients eat more and resist compulsive exercising and purging. For some outpatients, a short-term course of family therapy using these methods may be as effective as a long-term course; however, a shorter course of therapy may not be adequate for patients with severe obsessive-compulsive features or nonintact families.”
American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement: ”Individual and family therapy, the latter being especially important in working with younger children and adolescents, are crucial determinants of the long-term prognosis.”
Society for Adolescent Medicine Position Paper: "Family-based treatment should be considered an important part of treatment for most adolescents with eating disorders."
US National Institute of Mental Health “Some studies suggest that family-based therapies in which parents assume responsibility for feeding their afflicted adolescent are the most effective in helping a person with anorexia gain weight and improve eating habits and moods.”
UK NHS National Institute for Clinical Excellence Core Interventions: “Therapies to be considered for the psychological treatment of anorexia nervosa include cognitive analytic therapy (CAT), cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), focal psychodynamic therapy and family interventions focused explicitly on eating disorders.”
National Library of Medicine Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality “A form of family therapy focusing initially on parental control of re-nutrition delivered in two different manners revealed a significant advantage of conjoint therapy (family treated as a unit) over separated family therapy (parents and patient seen separately) on eating and mood outcomes but not on weight outcomes.”
American College of Sports Medicine Position Stand on the Female Athlete Triad The Position Stand says that "valuable members" of the "support team" in recovery include parents, and that the "first aim of treatment" is "to increase energy availability by increasing energy intake and/or reducing exercise energy expenditure."