Doughnut Mom
Really? A mom who takes her kids to a doughnut shop, buys one a treat and tells the other she can't have one because she's fat? Talk about a way to give a kid eating disorders!
shareThat's the whole point of the show and that scenario!
That's why they acted it out--to see if people would offer to help and support the girl.
If it were real life, it would be cruel.
Even though the scenario was a set up, I still thought it was cruel to the child actress playing the daughter who was denied the doughnut. She couldn't have been more than 12. I seem to remember the narrator saying something along the lines of "our actress is well prepared for the comments she'll hear today...". But was she really? How do they know she was prepared to be called 'fat', 'overweight', to be told she should look more like the thinner child actress?
To me, the thing that made it cruel was that the scenario was based on negative comments about her real body, not some made-up quality or behavior that many of the other scenarios are based on. That and the fact that she was a young, impressionable child dealing with these comments.
On a side note, my son noticed a poster in the window of the doughnut shop that was clearly promoting the show and said 'What Would You Do?' right on it. We couldn't make out the rest of the poster so no idea if it was a watch-this-show advertisement or an announcement that What Would You Do? had visited/was filming in the shop. It was only visible from certain angles when the patrons in line were being filmed.