Our Story

We asked our son how school was. He said it was fine.

It wasn't.

That gap, between what he told us and what was actually going on, is where this all started.

Even before MANTOI had a name, we were trying small things with him. When he avoided his work, we'd set a timer for two minutes and tell him he could stop when it rang if he wanted. Most days, he kept going. When something was bothering him, we'd ask him to share one feeling from his day, and we'd just listen. No fixing, no lecture.

Those small things mattered more than we knew. There was a period he was struggling and hid it from us. What helped wasn't another talk. It was him knowing home was still the place where even the messy feelings were safe to say out loud.

Around that time, his grandmother got him hooked on Pokemon. One evening, just for fun, we started imagining "evolutions" of his nickname, 小馒头 (little mantou). Chilli mantou. Kaya mantou. He loved it, and so did we. We kept going. [Check out the original evolution chart below]

Looking back at the small things we'd been doing with him, something clicked. The timer trick is basically what Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, in two minutes. The "tell someone who'll just listen" habit is straight out of John Gottman's work on emotion coaching. We hadn't invented anything. We'd been doing it by instinct. Now we had a name for why it worked.

Mantou. Inner. MANTOI.

Kids don't sit through lessons about feelings. They sit through games. So the small things became characters, and the characters became a game, MANTOI Inner Circle.

Each one got redrawn from scratch, with a Singapore touch. Plain Mantoi, Chillimantou, Mantcoco and Kayantou are the first four. Along the way, choosing the right animal companion for each character led us somewhere we didn't expect, a quiet thread of conservation running through the whole IP. More on that as we grow.

If any of this feels familiar, come meet them. [Meet the characters by clicking on the chart below]