I'll never ever understand the need some people have to show how bad they can be at parenting. I'm all for accepting you're human and we obviously all make mistakes. But from that to writing an article in Vogue about how you put your 7-year-old daughter on a diet so she could lose 16 pounds while humiliating her every step of the way there's a huge gap. I just really want to know why Dara Lynn-Weiss thought it would be a good idea to write about this because I don't get it.
Weiss says she decided to put her daughter in a diet because s__he was told by the pediatrician that her daughter was clinically obese__. This is, without a doubt, no laughing matter considering the Centers for Disease control says so are 17 percent of American children. To be sure, Weiss was right to try to want to find a way to deal with her daughter's overweight issue, but she was completely wrong to go about it in such a cruel and stringent manner.
Read more in ¿Qué más?: These 5 simple tricks are the key to losing weight
Check out some of what she tells Vogue readers she was doing to stop her daughter from eating:
I cringe when I recall the many times I had it out with Bea over a snack given to her by a friend's parent or caregiver … rather than direct my irritation at the grown-up, I often derided Bea for not refusing the inappropriate snack. And there have been many awkward moments at parties, when Bea has wanted to eat, say, both cookies and cake, and I've engaged in a heated public discussion about why she can't.
Will somebody plesase explain to me why she had to humiliate her daughter so in front of everybody? As someone who has never really had any issues with weight (don't worry, I give your permission to hate me), I clearly can't relate to some of what Weiss is writing about, including her confession of how her own struggles with how her body looks. Even so (or because of it), I'll never understand this country's obsession with the way we look. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for healthy living for both myself and my children, but to put so much importance on how we look? For what?
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I only say this because Weiss tell us in her article that when she asks her daughter "if she likes how she looks now, if she's proud of what she's accomplished, she says yes…Even so, the person she used to be still weighs on her." Poor child! Although I must say she at least sounds much more mature and sensible than her mother, as evident from what she tells her: "I'm not a different person just because I lost sixteen pounds."
Why do you think this mom thought it was a good idea to write about this for Vogue?
Image via Picture Youth/flickr
