If I had an obese child, I would do the diet thing and look on it as teaching empowerment and self-control. It would be hard, and even harder if the child was continually receiving high-calorie food at school, in the form of big lunches, snack times, class birthday parties, special outings and pizza fests as rewards for good behavior (as Dara-Lynn Weiss describes for her child’s school). Dara-Lynn was told by her child’s preschool teacher that at age 4, her daughter would stay eating at the snack table all by herself when all the other children had long since run off to play.

Seriously. What would you do in that situation? What IS good parenting?

As for the mother’s actions creating the possibility of an eating disorder in the child, it seems to me that the child already had an eating disorder, one that many people, adults and children, do suffer from: addiction to carbohydrates, most likely. So Dara-Lynn was trying to wean her from an existing addiction. There may be a risk of driving her to some different eating disorder such as anorexia, but I think that is fairly unlikely; like Dara-Lynn herself and many, many other people, carbohydrate-addicts tend to be weight yo-yo-ers, sometimes yielding to temptation and gaining weight, other times exercising self-control to lose weight. The result is probably less dangerous than either the extreme of becoming obese or the extreme of anorexia, and it does have its rewards.

I do agree that Dara-Lynn should probably never have let the child reach such an excessive weight in the first place, and that once she heard the “wake-up” call, she reacted with both hysteria and a somewhat vulgar desire for the spotlight (what else can be expected of a “socialite”?) But I can’t blame her; people do not choose to be hysterical, and if the spotlight makes her feel rewarded for putting in a difficult effort, then why should she not be rewarded, even if it is certainly not the reward that I would choose? I think that what Dara-Lynn did had to be done in the only way she could.