This week, we’re re-examining five episodes that are particularity related to the holiday season. 



Today, we’re talking about family traditions. 



See the original episode sources and script.  

Holiday Replay: Family Traditions

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720: Chores

The lexicon available to us to express delight, excitement, joy, or any number of other emotions, doesn’t always feel quite adequate, at least in the English language. There could be ten thousand available words, but that doesn’t mean one will fit like you need or want it to. 




Then, in 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary added “squee” to the official list of quote-unquote real words in the English language, defining it as an exclamation used to express great delight or excitement. But, as per usual, that’s not where the story of squee began. 




Instead, squee started around 1865, when it was used to describe a high-pitched squealing or squeaking sound in the sentence “when, squee, rhepe, twiddle, went the third violin.” Then in the comic Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 AD, the comics used the word “squee” to describe the sound of a robot dying after it’s been killed by the hero. 




And then, it was in a 1998 Usenet group conversation in that the modern usage of squee has been tracked down to. Someone was chatting about getting something Star Wars in the mail and expressed their happiness and excitement. 




The reaction we as humans have to seeing something cute is pretty universal, and while the sound and the language we use to express the excitement may change… but a sound of squee seems pretty universal. 


716: Squee

I’ll give fair warning here — if you have any kind of a fraught relationship with food, then following up on any of the research mentioned in today’s episode (or heck, today’s episode in general) could be very triggering. I offer this warning as a fat — and happily so — person myself, and as someone who takes issue with how much obesity is turned into a boogeyman in research. 




All of that said, there’s a LOT of research out there about how parents, teachers, child-care workers, and the environment around kids helps develop and nurture their relationship to food. And while a lot of the research is tied back to obesity for headlines or in order to describe health outcomes, the research is still valid, often at least, when viewed through the lens of intuitive eating. 




In a study about parenting practices with adolescents published in a 2013 edition of the journal Pediatrics, researchers found that even into the teen years, parents are much more likely to engage in one of two controlling food related-practices, either pressure-to-eat or artificial food restriction. 




It doesn’t tend to start in the teen years, however. It starts much younger and the impacts last much longer. As a 2018 paper called “Justifying by Healthifying” found that the clean-your-plate mentality — otherwise called “consumption closure,” creates a mindset where we underestimate the caloric load of a food and overestimate the health value of just about any kind of food if we’re primed to eat most or all of it. 




 As Parents magazine quoted:



“If children are encouraged to eat when they’re not hungry often enough, they can lose touch with the signals of hunger and fullness and are more prone to overeat,” says Katja Rowell, M.D., a childhood feeding specialist. “I think many adults have lost touch with their own hunger and fullness cues and don’t trust that children can manage their own eating. It helps to remember that only the child knows how much he is hungry for. Some days he may eat a lot, other days less.”




In other words, it’s when we force ourselves – or force kids – to ignore their body’s signals for hunger and fullness, that we start to lose touch with those signals. 


713: Clean Your Plate

In 2013, two researchers published in the Journal of Psychology integration a review of the research and discussion of the phenomena of self-criticism. That particular paper defined self-criticism as, quote:



a conscious evaluation of one-self that can be a healthy and reﬂexive behavior, but also can have harmful effects and consequences for an individual.




In other words, reflecting upon your thoughts, beliefs, words and actions can be very useful. But like all things that get a bit overwhelming in too heavy of a dose, self-criticism tends to tip the scale into a harmful realm when it becomes harmful. 




Generally, the research on individuals who are very self-critical and/or perfectionist tends to treat those particular behaviors as associated behaviors – or even symptoms of – depression and anxiety. But several researchers are starting to dig in to the idea that perhaps, rather than a symptom alone, that even neurotypical individuals may have topics or areas where they are very self-critical in ways that become damaging. 




And while it can be tempting to think that being hard on yourself is part of what drives success, it’s worth paying attention to the conclusion of the 2011 article “The Effects of Self-Criticism and Self-Oriented Perfectionism on Goal Pursuit:” 



Although self-criticism has previously been shown to be related to diminished goal progress, a controversy remains regarding the potential association between aspects of “positive perfectionism,” such as self-oriented perfectionism, and enhanced goal progress. The results of the five studies demonstrated a consistent pattern of negative association between self-criticism and goal progress. 


711: Too Hard On Yourself

Leadership is one of those topics that seems to come up time and time again. Back in episode 486, we examined what it means to be a supervisor, and the fact that only one-third or so of people aspire to any kind of leadership at all. Even with that, however, it’s often true that those who become leaders may or may not have wanted to be named that, or are even officially in leadership positions. 




Once you are in a leadership position – if you want to be or not – there is no dearth of options of what kind of leader you might be, number of books to read about leadership, or even entire degrees of every level you can get in leadership studies. 




The HubSpot blog outlines seven different types of leadership styles, ranging from democratic to autocratic, strategic to transactional. 




Meanwhile, the Association for Talent Development instead breaks leadership up into five styles – managerial, relational, motivational, inspirational, and transformational. 




Blog WiseToast goes even further, with 12 different types of leadership outlined and The Executive Connection outlines nine common leadership styles. 




While there’s crossover in all of these, there’s also a drive here similar to ones we have talked about in the past – a drive to categorize and organize the experiences we have, ways we interact with others, and ways we think about ourselves in a way that may be useful to us. The power of that kind of examination, however, comes not in the fact that we can name our leadership style (official or not) as one thing or the other — the power comes in using that information, feedback, and  framework as a jumping off point for determining how we want to interact with that world. 


Holiday Replay: Family Traditions

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