"Kindness can be a key factor to help eating disorders."
A Surrey expert in eating disorders has offered his advice around eating disorders going into the school summer holidays.
As schools go into the summer holiday, Childline have released figures on how many counselling they've had where the main concern was about eating disorders.
Last year, Childline delivered 3,421 counselling sessions where the main concern was eating/body image disorders.
In the same time period, Childline delivered almost 1,000 counselling sessions where a young person mentioned body image issues.
As well as this 970 counselling sessions were delivered where a young person mentioned calorie and/or food restriction.
All schools will have broken up for summer holiday this Friday (25 July), which according to Alan Bore, can have a significant factor on eating disorders.
Alan Bore co-founded and is the operational director for the Surrey Centre for Counselling, and specialises in eating disorders.
He says that there are many reasons why summer holidays can effect young people's eating habits, one of which being the change of routine.
"There's less structure, so they've got more time on their hands and the social pressures of being with young people, wanting to be thin, needing to be thin and being obsessive around it.
But also on the other side of that, you've got people when they're on their own, they overeat. There's a lot of loneliness, they use food as a way of comfort."
Going into the summer holiday, he says that what people see on social media can influence what young people believe they should look like.
"There's many, many, many factors that could be looking at social media, for example, all the the pressures around you know, looking good, the pressures of being slim, thin and using food as a way of controlling what's going on with their body."
He also offered his advice to parents if they were to notice there children struggling with the issue.
"The first thing I will say to any parent is to be kind, be kind to your kids. They're struggling, everybody's frightened, and I see that happening. Get help, talk to somebody."