You can lead a kid to broccoli but you can't make him eat it. If that's your parenting style, then scrape those untouched veggies into the garbage disposal and try again tomorrow. And dump the guilt down the drain, too: Your kids are less likely to be overweight than kids who grow up in a clean-your-plate household, according to a new study.

A study in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics finds that strict disciplinarian mothers are even more likely to raise chubby kids than those derelict moms who let their youngsters graze on Pringles and M&Ms. Moms who set clear rules and enforce them with flexibility and respect are least likely to have overweight youngsters.

The study of 872 families divided mothers into four groups — authoritarian, permissive, neglectful and flexible — and checked the kids' body mass indexes two years later. Roughly 10 percent of first-graders with permissive or neglectful mothers were overweight, compared with 17 percent of those with strict disciplinarian mothers and less than 4 percent of those with flexible moms.

This makes perfect sense to anyone who was forced as a child to sit for hours at the dinner table, staring sullenly at a pile of cold lima beans long after everyone else had finished their dessert. Far from encouraging healthy eating habits, that sort of discipline fostered a lifelong hostility to lentils and a rebellious tendency in adulthood to eat Ben & Jerry's straight out of the carton, often instead of dinner.

But today's kids aren't waiting 'til they grow up to get fat. About a third of children ages 2-19 are overweight — three times as many as in the mid-1960s, with the biggest increases coming since 1990. Doctors also are seeing an alarming number of children with typically adult health problems such as diabetes and hypertension.

It's no wonder some mothers, especially the ones who are predisposed to micromanage their kids' lives, react by declaring the house a fat- and sugar-free zone. But good intentions can backfire. Too much anxiety in the home can cause kids to overeat for comfort or escape — if it doesn't trigger eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia.

Kids who are allowed judicious access to the cookie jar, though, sometimes forget it's there. And the ones who aren't force-fed asparagus are more inclined to try it, perhaps not the first time it appears on their plates, but eventually. Given choices — and limits — kids can learn to self-regulate. The lesson for moms is that in parenting, as in dieting, moderation is the key.

The study drew no conclusions about fathers because precious few of them participated. Our unscientific observation is that when it comes to nutrition, Dad is often either the good cop or the bad example...or both.