Although defining the buffer size with a #define is one idiomatic way to do it, another would be to use a macro like this:

#define member_size(type, member) (sizeof( ((type *)0)->member ))

and use it like this:

typedef struct
{
    float calc;
    char text[255];
    int used;
} Parent;

typedef struct
{
    char flag;
    char text[member_size(Parent, text)];
    int used;
} Child;

I'm actually a bit surprised that sizeof(((type *)0)->member) is even allowed as a constant expression. Cool stuff.

The compiler may add padding for alignment requirements. Note that this applies not only to padding between the fields of a struct, but also may apply to the end of the struct (so that arrays of the structure type will have each element properly aligned).

For example:

struct foo_t {
    int x;
    char c;
};

Even though the c field doesn't need padding, the struct will generally have a sizeof(struct foo_t) == 8 (on a 32-bit system - rather a system with a 32-bit int type) because there will need to be 3 bytes of padding after the c field.

Note that the padding might not be required by the system (like x86 or Cortex M3) but compilers might still add it for performance reasons.