I know, it’s like all I am doing lately is quick little article-debunkings. Soon, my pets, I will have time for blogging again. Like roughly two weeks from now. Ahem.

Let’s start with the bad. Today’s Boston Globe has an article about trying to tell our kids how fat they are. And how it’s, like, hard. For one, the parent in question is often the mom, who, being female and human, usually has her own raft of body issues, many of which she has probably modeled for her kid. That’s what we call a vicious cycle, friends. Mom inherits emotional issues with body size and food and eating from her mom, then passes same on to her own kids.

…When her child started gaining weight in high school, [Agnes] Mastropietro was torn between telling Michelle to put down the chips and keeping quiet for fear of hurting her or triggering an eating disorder. […] In her case, Mastropietro said that when she did suggest that her daughter stop eating high-calorie food, her teenager played “the sensitive card’’ and started crying. “She’d say, ‘You’re supposed to love me the way I am.’ ’’

The sensitive card.

The sensitive card.

I daresay this reaction sounds a little dismissive. As though the teen in question is being intentionally manipulative by daring to cry and to state that a parent — A PARENT — should love their child no matter what that child looks like. Unfortunately, the teenager is in the right here, and that’s not something you’ll hear me say very often.

There is also a Token Asshole, because you need one in such articles to deliver the Hard Truth, when everyone is busy wringing their hands over their child’s stupid dumb feelings.

Not everyone agrees with the sensitive approach. Why pussy-foot around, asks John Mayer, a clinical psychologist in Chicago, and author of [book I refuse to promote on my blog]. “Would you be ‘delicate’ to insist that your child needs to take chemotherapy for a suspected cancer??’’ he wrote in an e-mail. “NO, as a responsible parent you would say: ‘This is what you are doing to save your life.’ Why do we treat obesity and weight control differently when so many more kids suffer from this illness than they do cancer?? Let’s stop the rhetoric and take action as parents.’’