How to - or How Not to - Put Your Child on a Diet Let us say that your 4-year-old needs size 8 clothing - not for the length, but for the width. That when she's 5, friends and family are directly addressing what usually goes unspoken: her desserts, her juice intake, the way you handle her meals. Her teacher notes that she "doesn't self-regulate" at snack time. By the time she's 6, the pediatrician is in on it: you need to "do something" about her weight. And at 7, after a year of inconsistent effort, with a daughter who is 4 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 93 pounds, you put your child on a diet. Finally, two grown inches and 16 lost pounds later, you write about your and your child's year-long effort for Vogue magazine, with a photo shoot accompaniment that shows off your mutual achievement (and your daughter's long, thin, mini-skirted legs). Success story, or the beginning of an 8-year-old's lifelong battle with weight issues - or both? Dara-Lynn Weiss is the Vogue writer, and her daughter, Bea, is her subject. Hers is a blunt, Tiger-mom style saga of snatching salad from a child who's already had dinner, "accounting for" every Oreo and pouring out a drink at Starbucks when the barista can't narrow down its calorie count from the "120-210″ listed on the menu board. The article isn't available online, but it's heavily excerpted by Katie J. M. Baker for Jezebel in "Mom Puts 7-Year-Old on a Diet in Worst Vogue Article Ever." I do have a print copy of the story, and it's not an inspirational, feel-good tale. What it does seem to be is an honest one: a mother, with food issues of her own ("I've been on and off Weight Watchers, Atkins, Slim-Fast, LA Weight Loss, Jenny Craig, juice diets and raw-food diets ... I went months (maybe years) without so much as an apple, allocating all my calories to more decadent pursuits"), and a child who, although she's been teased a little at school and told about her health risks, isn't fully on board with the restrictive plan that's been made for her. In one sense, it reads like the beginning of every eating disorder memoir ever written. But many mothers have weight and food issues, and many 7-year-olds aren't enthusiastic about cutting down on pizza. And in spite of those issues, and the difficulty nearly every dieter faces in making a significant change, Ms. Weiss and her daughter do succeed - at least based on the photos and the numbers. But what bothers Jezebel's Ms. Baker (and many others) most is the way Ms. Weiss ends her story. When the little girl, now 8 years old, looks at pictures of her heavier self (not included in Vogue), she insists, powerfully, that "that's still me. I'm not a different person just because I lost 16 pounds. Most of us would agree that she's right, but her mother doesn't. "I protest," Ms. Weiss writes. She is, indeed, different. It's those words that have raised red flags with parents across the Internet. A child may need to lose weight, but does she need to become "different" in the process? As a contrast, consider the family of Marshall Reid, who, at 10 years old and tired of being teased about his weight, set out with his mother and sister to "change his lifestyle." The family chronicled their efforts to eat smaller portions and consider ingredients on a YouTube channel, a Web site, and eventually in a cookbook ("Portion Size Me"). It cannot have been all smooth sailing, but you can feel young Mr. Reid's enthusiasm for his goal - which wasn't in numbers, but in change - in every word and every video. It's also hard to miss his mother's warmth for her son at any weight (her son "removed himself from the obese category" but no specific numbers are given). Helping a child who weighs too much now, but still needs to keep growing, is a challenge that there's more than one way to meet, and there is obviously more than one difference between these two children and families. Yet I'm struck by this one: the Reids suggest that it's possible to shift to healthier habits together, and support each other through the moments when it just doesn't feel like a single Oreo will do. Ms. Weiss seems to argue that sometimes, a parent has to force her child to do what she knows is best, and that children are not always going to willingly go along with the program. Can a parent's demands create long-term change in a child, or does a successful healthy relationship with food have to come from within at any age?