Examples for parents
Imagine you are a parent and your child is trying to figure something out, like what to do for the summer. As your child talks to you, what kinds of questions do you feel drawn to ask? Do the questions have more to do with supporting your child in exploring the parts of the conversation your child wants to explore or more to do with your own concerns? What could enable your child to get the benefit of having plenty of room to talk out loud and to take the conversation wherever your child wants to go with it?
If your child knows about Teddy Bear Talk Support (TBTS), then your child can ask you to be a “teddy bear.” Serving as a teddy bear means that, for a short length of time, you’ve agreed to be a listener that does very little talking. You’ll only talk when your child asks you to do things like ask questions or reflect some things back to your child.
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Let’s look at cases where you’re serving as a teddy bear for your child. What are you not saying because you're mainly just listening? There are times when you can benefit from making your relationship with your child more important than getting to say certain things to your child, e.g., when your connection with your child in that moment and having the child feel heard is more important than making a point or "being right." Will your child take in what you might be tempted to say in the way you want your child to receive it? Because we are mostly remaining silent as a teddy bear, this may give us the chance to make different choices.
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Quote from a Teddy Bear Talk Support user: "... your Teddy Bear method works! ... the [teddy bear] imagery helps me remember that I want to protect the relationship [with my child] rather than get a specific result."
Expand the following section to see more of the quote:
... your Teddy Bear method works! Well, it works for me as an imagery (more than the giraffe imagery [from Nonviolent Communication with the giraffe and the jackal]). I was in Singapore with my parents and it was with them I tried being a Teddy Bear. Let me tell you, I typically try to solve their problems or I try to counsel my mother to let my dad's trespasses go, which I know is not what she wants to hear. I try to listen, but it is hard. So I imagined myself a Teddy Bear and it helped me curb my instinct to react.
I also tried being a Teddy Bear with my kids. Of course, on a day to day basis, that's harder when I have to get things done. But the imagery helps me remember that I want to protect the relationship rather than get a specific result.
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Let’s look at an example where a young child Anna has been asked by her father Tom to serve as a teddy bear. Tom is trying to finish writing an email before they need to leave the house and Anna is begging him to sing a song. Tom knows he won’t be able to sing and finish the email at the same time, so he says, “Tell you what. I’ll be happy to sing a song in another few minutes. Could you be a teddy bear for me so I can finish up more quickly?” Anna agrees and this is what happens:
- Tom: Sigh. It’s taken me so long to reply. I could actually hit send right now, but I’ve been waiting because I was thinking that I could include my new draft if I’d gotten further along with it. Now, because I don’t want to include the new draft at this point, I seem to be stuck because I seem to have a rule that all this time can’t have passed for no reason. I can’t just send what I already had before.
- Anna: Sounds like you feel sad…and stuck… It sounds like you don’t know what to do.
- Tom: But, why do I have this rule? Oh wait, actually, I can just send her one little part that I could use help on. That’s better than sending her the whole draft and if I could actually get some help with that one little part, that’d be fabulous.
Having a teddy bear along for the ride can:
- Cause different things to jump out at you automatically, making it much easier to build momentum and gain traction.
- Support you with the feeling that help is right within reach.
- Cause shifts in perspectives, mindsets, etc, perhaps because of being more likely to stumble across things, like assumptions you didn't even know you were making.
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Often, for talkers, getting the chance to share what's going on with themselves with someone else might be more important than anything else. But, in normal conversations, the tendency for the listener to try to fix things for the talker can interfere with this. Being able to preface something with "I just want a teddy bear" provides an easy shorthand for clearly indicating times when talkers don't want listeners to fix things for them, to give them advice/suggestions, etc.
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Instead of offering advice or trying to "fix" someone from the outside, we empower them to discover their own wisdom from inside themselves, by helping them be free of the inward and outward interference that can block their inner voice of truth.
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An important thing to note about TBTS is that the teddy bear doesn’t need to fully understand what the talker is saying. The talker is speaking for the talker’s own benefit, not the teddy bear's! Serving as a teddy bear is how one mother was able to help her high school son with complex math that she couldn't understand. He talked through the math problems, and she served as the teddy bear, the second set of eyes, the other mind, the person to explain things to.
TBTS is perfect for being able to have more connection with people who might otherwise be feeling lonely about having to work on something all by themselves. It can be so easy to feel isolated, and it helps to have easy ways to reach out. Instead of telling your kids it's time to go do something (e.g., clean their room, do their homework), you can invite them to co-work with you. Have them do their own work, while you do yours, but every 20 minutes take a break from doing work and take turns doing TBTS with each other for three minutes each. That way, while they're doing an onerous thing, you're also doing work alongside them. Plus, you’ve "baked in" opportunities for benefiting from TBTS.
Not needing to fully understand also means that you can connect with the excitement and the ups and downs of a story that your child wants to share, even if you’re not a passionate expert on the topic like your child is. After my 12-year-old’s Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, he had a long story about what had just happened involving how “he [the opponent] went for a one-leg, so I swooped down at the same time and got him in closed guard.” I could easily hear how satisfying it was for my son to predict what would work and could share in it with him, even though I didn’t know what all the terms meant. Similarly, sometimes you can connect by having a child talk out loud about what they are doing or planning while the child is working on a project that you may or may not understand. This worked well with my son when I offered to be a teddy bear for him when he was deciding what he wanted to draw next. Being able to do some out loud processing gave him momentum and traction, whereas before he was at a loss for ideas.
So, if the talker is just repeatedly saying the words "grumble grumble grumble," that works, too. You don’t have to understand why the talker is saying whatever they are saying. This can be a very satisfying way to convey the gist of what matters in that moment. One day, I found that saying "grumble grumble grumble" over and over again was a great way to acknowledge, validate, and sit with how I was feeling. The content of the words I would've said instead of "grumble grumble grumble" didn't matter. It was getting to feel the feeling that mattered. So, this made it so the content of the words didn't have undue influence.
Having children serve as teddy bears can give parents the chance to model some things for their children. For example, you can talk through prioritizing what you're going to do, how to get started when you're not sure where to start, how you go about decision making for making a purchase, a situation with work that can give your child a “take your child to work”- like experience, trying to get unstuck with something you feel stuck on, etc.
Think of the benefits children can get from having different windows into our worlds. How often do we get to hear what someone else's self-talk is like, what they find challenging, what helps them cope, etc? Plus, children get to feel helpful to us by being teddy bears. It's a great feeling!
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When arguments come up (or other conversations where people are trying to talk about a different agenda at the same time), TBTS is good for having interactions be about one person’s agenda at a time. Another thing TBTS is good for is helping people feel heard. So, shifting gears and taking turns serving as teddy bears for each other can be a gamechanger when you’re arguing or trying to talk about different agendas at the same time.
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A mother was able to use TBTS to get out of “parent mode” by having the teddy bear do something that I found surprising. The mother and her child, Serena, were talking about how adults can find it hard to say “I don’t know.” They decided to have the mother practice by having her be a teddy bear that only says “I don’t know.” All was going well until Serena asked “Why am I alive?” The mother was supposed to say “I don’t know.” She simply couldn’t. Finally, she compromised. She said “What would be the benefit of me not giving you an answer?” She then saw Serena find her own truth.