Girl, 10, Pens Handwritten Petition Asking Magazines to Diversify Their Images

— -- A mother, who says she has battled bulimia and struggled with body issues since childhood, was shocked when her 10-year-old daughter created a handwritten petition asking magazines to diversify their images.

Author Glennon Doyle Melton wrote in her now viral blog post about the moment her daughter Tish first approached her, asking: "Mama, the other girls are all skinny. Why am I different?"

Melton, 40, continued, "I stared at her and silently lost my mind. Ten is when I noticed my differentness, too. Ten is when I decided there was something wrong with me and became bulimic."

"The funny thing is I actually speak and write and talk about this kind of stuff a lot but in the moment when I really needed to have the words, it just all escaped me for a minute," Melton told ABC News.

Still, Melton eventually found the words and had a two-hour discussion about body image.

And after a quick stop at the bookstore, where she caught Tish staring at a magazine rack featuring thin blonde models, Melton realized that their discussion had helped Tish understand because soon Tish was yelling from her room, asking how to spell the word "petition."

As it turned out, Tish had handwritten a petition saying "that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique and show woman of all different types of hair and bodies."

"All women should be treated equally," her petition concluded.

Melton said reading the petition was a moment of "utter joy."

"Girls either get sick or angry," she said. "You can take it internally and feel shame and feel like it's your problem and then get sick or you can see it as the world's problem and then you get angry. If we can raise a generation of girls who get pissed about it, things may change."

The mother of three also said she wants to encourage moms to talk to their daughters about the images they're consuming from different types of media, including magazines.

"Most of the mothers I talk with have the same body image problems, which is why it's so tricky. It's like, 'How do I talk to my daughter about this when I am this?' But we don't have to have it figured it out before we teach it," Melton said.

Melton added that Tish already has a few handwritten signatures on her petition -- five and counting.