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The NY Post Thinks This Lady Is The Worst Mom In NYC
By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 20, 2013
Modified Jan 21, 2013
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Jan 20, 2013
Modified Jan 21, 2013
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We've come across a lot of potential candidates for "worst mom" in our time—tan mom and stroller fight mom come to mind—but the NY Post's highly qualified team of experts on horribleness (no doubt Andrea Peyser and Linda Stasi sit on the board of directors) have crunched the numbers and pointed their finger at Dara-Lynn Weiss. Their rhetorical headline asks: "Is this NYC's worst mom?" So our question is: does Weiss, let alone any woman, deserve such unpleasant notoriety? Or is she really that terrible?
In case the name isn't instantly familiar, Weiss is the mom who wrote a controversial article for Vogue about putting her 7-year-old daughter on a diet, exposing her own warts-and-all unhealthy relationship with food in the process. It came complete with a glamorous photograph of herself and her daughter (see above). That article led to widespread outrage on the web—Jezebel called her, “The most fucked up, selfish woman to ever grace the magazine's pages”—but it also led to a book deal for Weiss, who wrote the memoir, "The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet."
This has, in turn, led to more interviews for Weiss, and more accusations that she is exploiting her daughter (having already toxically influenced her self-image) for fame and profit. In one such interview with the Times, Weiss says she thinks her daughter "should be proud" of her weight loss, and reflects on the controversy around her article:
It’s true that after I read all of what came after I wrote the article, I didn’t feel like working on the book again for a while. But I came to realize that I was letting myself be scared into silence. The backlash was part of the whole reason I wanted the conversation to continue.
People are so critical of childhood obesity, and then you try to do something about it — to help your child — and they’re critical of that, too. Parents can’t win. I wanted to stick up for Bea and myself and my family and our choices. And I did get a lot of support and gratitude from other parents who are actually in our position, so I felt a bit of an obligation to put something out there that they could relate to about dealing with an obese child. It’s not so easy.
Of course, that damned if you do/damned if you don't attitude has already been dissected by others, such as Gawker, who pointed out that the problem with the original piece wasn't that she took action about her daughter's obesity, but rather the very public way in which she did: "You are certainly damned if you don't destroy your kid's self esteem forever and publish it in a magazine dedicated to deifying anorexia. What choice do you even have?"
The NY Post take a decidedly negative view of the Vogue photoshoot: "So Weiss shamed her daughter as fat in the pages of a national magazine, held the child — and herself — up to ridicule and scorn. But at least she got that book deal." They also chide her for wanting to keep her daughter out of it now that she’s going on the talk-show circuit, which they call too-little too-late.
In another interview with NY Magazine, Weiss defended her decision to help her daughter "take responsibility" for her own body, saying her daughter was proud of her "achievement:"
I stand by the assertion that obesity is bad, but not because it makes you look bad. Someone can be heavy and healthy and that’s great and that’s fine. In some ways, I don’t think that we should extend body acceptance to situations where the child is unhealthy. For Bea, her blood pressure was high. She went from a normal to a high blood pressure in a year and gained twenty pounds. It was something that was very immediately affecting her health.
I understand the desire to make a child feel beautiful at any weight. I truly advocate for size acceptance. The culture of body image upsets me and has tortured me personally. I do think we should be able to be different sizes but I draw the line at when it starts affecting her health. I always hear from parents who have overweight kids, “I would never say a word to my child about her weight.” I don’t know that that’s the way to preserve a child’s self-esteem. The openness and the loving, humorous, supportive way we deal with this issue, I hope, will create an environment where food and weight are not shameful secret things we can't talk about as a family.
There's no denying that there are a lot of complicated, contradicting elements to Weiss' story—on the one hand, Weiss was following doctor's and nutritionist's recommendations to put her daughter on a diet, and was encouraging her to lose weight by "reducing processed food, increasing fruits and vegetables, and getting a little more exercise." At the same time, there were the excerpts about her having meltdowns in Starbucks, and her troubling need to push her daughter into the limelight from the start. As a mother writing at The Cut put it, Weiss' "obsessive narcissism" is what disturbed so many moms. But do you think it warrants "worst mom in NYC" status?
Tagged
bad moms
bold statements
Dara-Lynn Weiss
moms
ny post
worst mom in nyc
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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