Nurturing Spiritual Awareness in Children—Your Role and Influence

What we learn from the spiritual experiences of children raised by mediums.

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and founder of BestPsychicDirectory.com. You’re reading his articles on Bob Olson Connect.

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

CHILDREN WHO BECOME MEDIUMS

Early in my investigation of the afterlife, I interviewed dozens of mediums to learn about people's ability to communicate with spirits from another dimension. I wondered if psychic and mediumistic abilities might be hereditary—were they passed down from generation to generation? What I learned might surprise you.

One medium I interviewed believed her ability to communicate with spirits began at the age of ten when she contracted scarlet fever. I’ll call her Julie. This is what she told me about her memory of that experience.

“I was diagnosed with scarlet fever. For ten days, I was isolated from my family. I noticed a lot of relatives were now visiting who rarely came to visit. I concluded that I must be dying. One night...a monk with a long beard appeared at the foot of my bed. He was standing, actually more like hovering there, looking at me. I couldn’t see his feet. His hands were wrapped into his cloak. And his face was partially hidden by his hood.

“I can't say that I didn’t feel some fear. I was definitely afraid. As he moved closer and leaned over me, I realized that I couldn’t move, like I was paralyzed. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t do that either. Then he sort of sighed, and it felt like his breath touched me. It actually felt like his breath cooled my fever. I just lay there in my bed, unable to move.

“The monk then reached out his hand and touched my forehead. He whispered, ‘Sight,’ before smiling at me and then floating away. Then he just disappeared. I remember sitting up and feeling like my fever was gone. Then I just went to sleep.

“The next morning when I got up, I ran into the kitchen where my mother was making me some tea. I remember asking her if I could have something good instead of tea because I was starving. She just stared at me in disbelief. I felt great and was running around like normal. It wasn't until later that evening, when I sat down to dinner with my family, that I told them about the monk. Nobody said anything, but my mother looked at me and squeezed my hand. I felt like she believed me.”

As I interviewed Julie, I wondered if her mother, Helen, believed her daughter’s story. Helen later told me that she remembers Julie telling her about the monk after her scarlet fever mysteriously disappeared. Helen admitted, “I really didn’t think much about it. I assumed it was either the fever or she was just being a kid.” She indicated that psychic and mediumistic abilities weren’t common in previous generations on either side of the family, as far as she knew.

My investigation of the afterlife has indicated that most children are more naturally attuned to their intuitive abilities than adults. This is probably because they haven’t yet been trained to rely on their other five senses more than their sixth sense. The fact that children have not been away from the spirit world long may also be a factor in this increased awareness.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS

It's not uncommon for children to see and talk with the spirits of deceased relatives. Yet, many parents write this off as their child having an “imaginary friend.”

My wife, Melissa, used to have an imaginary friend named Sally growing up. At least, that is what adults taught her to believe—that her friend was imaginary. When we learned that children often see and communicate with spirits, Melissa realized her friend may not have been imaginary. It may have been that her friend was a spirit guide or someone from the spirit world.

I heard the story of one mother who asked her son who he was always talking to, assuming he had an imaginary friend. He named and accurately described the appearance of his grandfather. He even whistled a tune the grandfather used to sing to his daughter (the boy’s mother) as a young girl. When she questioned her son further, the boy told his mother additional details about his grandfather that he shouldn’t have known, considering the boy’s grandfather had died before he was born. Moreover, the parents had never talked about the grandfather in front of the boy because they thought he was too young to understand the concept of death.

CHILDREN OF PSYCHICS AND MEDIUMS

During my interviews with the family members of mediums, I wondered what happens when you grow up with a parent who is a medium and is open with their children about their abilities. You end up with children like Julie’s: Brian, James, Alan, and Elizabeth. For a couple of years, I had the opportunity to know them and interview them on this subject. What they had to say about spiritual matters spoke volumes.

I initially interviewed Brian and James, Julie’s eldest sons. At fifteen and fourteen, respectively, these boys were still willing to talk openly about their spiritual experiences. Later, I interviewed Alan (age thirteen) and Elizabeth (age eleven) after knowing them for nearly two years. Getting more than “yes” or “no” answers was difficult at these ages, so I waited a couple of years and tried again. When I tried a second time, like their older brothers, Alan and Elizabeth had no hesitation talking about their experiences with spirit, which were quite insightful.

Brian, the oldest, told me about visitation dreams where he had been visited by his grandfather and his Aunt Dede (their mother’s younger sister who died in an auto accident). Like most visitation dreams, Brian told me these dreams were very clear and in color. “After I dream about them, I feel like I just saw them, so they aren’t really gone. I feel like they are visiting me in my dream, and it makes me feel good to know they are around.”

His brother, James, has seen his grandfather the same way his mother sees spirits. “Our Papa is around. I’ve seen him. Sometimes, he just walks by, and a second later, he disappears.” I asked James if he was scared when he saw his grandfather. “No, it was comforting. Knowing he is still here is very comforting,” he told me.

James sees his grandfather two or three times a year, so I asked him about the first time he saw him.

“In the old house before this one, we had a desk in my room. I woke up to go to the bathroom, and Papa was just sitting on the small desk. Neither of us said anything. He was wearing a cloak with sandals, and his skin was a blue color—I don’t know why. I waved to him as I walked to the bathroom, and he waved back. It was as if I see him all the time. I guess I expected he would still be there when I got back. When I returned, he was gone. It wasn’t a dream. It was definitely real. But, at first, I wondered if I was dreaming. Then I realized I was awake, and I was happy to have seen him,” he concluded.

The youngest boy, Alan, shares the family gift as well. His mother, Julie, expects that if any of her children grow up to use their gift professionally, it is likely to be Alan.

“I saw a woman once,” said Alan, referring to a spirit he had seen. “She was wearing white and was just sitting on the couch. It was the middle of the day, so I wasn’t dreaming. It was sort of scary, but sort of not because I knew from Mom that she wasn’t going to hurt me. I just saw her for a few seconds, and then she was gone,” he told me.

“Another time, I was on the bus when I looked out the window and saw some people riding like a carriage kind of thing with horses pulling it. It looked like they were from a different time because of the clothes they were wearing. It looked different than if it were real people, but I couldn’t see through them like you might expect to see through spirits. But then I asked my friends on the bus if they saw them and they said they didn’t see anything. So I figured they were ghosts or something,” he explained.

Alan has also had what I would categorize as “dream visitations,” but he doesn’t recognize the people he sees. “It’s not anybody I know,” said Alan. “I just see their heads and faces. I see them real quick. It’s like they smile, and then I wake up. I don’t think they have a message for me, not that I can remember.”

Those aren’t the only kinds of dreams Alan has experienced. He also has premonition dreams now and then. “I often have dreams where I dream something, and then it happens in real life,” said Alan. I learned that this is something the other children regularly experience as well. Alan’s older brother, Brian, told me the same thing in my interview with him about two years earlier.

“Sometimes I dream of something, and the next day, I find myself doing that exact thing in the exact same situation,” Brian told me.

Elizabeth, the youngest of the siblings, has had similar dreams. “Sometimes I’ll have a dream, and then it will happen the next day,” Elizabeth told me. “Or in a week or so, I’ll remember that I saw those same people before in my dream.”

While it’s common for people to experience this phenomenon, Julie’s children seem to experience it more often than most. I wondered if it felt like déjà vu, the only reference I could use from my own experiences at the time (2000-2001). They didn’t describe it as feeling like déjà vu, but rather a premonition of what is about to take place. Déjà vu is a “feeling” that something has already occurred, a feeling of familiarity with a person, place, or event. What Alan, Elizabeth, and Brian described to me was not just a feeling but a vivid memory of a dream that was more like a snapshot of the future than an indescribable sensation.

Are children of mediums better equipped to remember their dreams as if they have an enhanced recall of them? Or are many children having these experiences, but nobody is interviewing them or listening when they are talking about them? Or perhaps Julie’s children are more open to these experiences because their mother has taught them not to push them away and feel foolish or ashamed to have them and talk about them. The mere fact that Julie talks to her children about these phenomena and that they could discuss these events in their conversations with her—and have them acknowledged by her without skepticism—might have allowed Julie’s children to remember these experiences more and let them occur without pushing them away.

Elizabeth, the youngest, also sees spirits like her mother. “I had just gone to bed for the night once when I saw my Aunt Dede standing near my doorway. She was very clear and all white. She didn’t say anything to me, but it made me feel good to see her. It made me feel happy to know that she is still here.”

Elizabeth has seen other spirits as well. “Every once in a while, I see quick glimpses of people walking by my bedroom door. These are just people who are in the house, though; I don’t know who they are. It’s sort of scary because they walk by real quick, and then they are gone. A couple times, I’ve got up and looked in the hall, but nobody was there. Usually, I don’t even look. Sometimes, if I have to go to the bathroom, I don’t even go because I’m scared to walk out of my room,” she said, laughing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

After hours of interviewing Julie’s children and knowing them for years, I can tell you that Brian, James, Alan, and Elizabeth are some of the most level-headed, down-to-earth kids you could ever meet. They achieve high grades in school, are active in several extracurricular activities, and are some of the most polite and well-mannered kids I’ve had the pleasure to know. So, if you were wondering what effects it might have on children to know that spirits exist and watch over us, these are four healthy examples to indicate positive results from such a childhood knowing.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves about the implications of not helping our children with their spiritual development. I’m not referring to religion, necessarily, as most people don’t hesitate to expose their children to religious beliefs. Instead, I’m referring to the attention adults give to their children's spiritually related experiences, similar to Julie’s kids, regardless of their religious affiliation or beliefs.

I learned a lot from my interviews with the children of mediums. To begin, if our children are having conversations with someone invisible to our eyes, we shouldn’t assume there isn’t someone there. I don’t mean to imply that children don’t make up people in their imaginations—I’m sure that many do—but my research has indicated that numerous children have seen or communicated with people not of this world.

Many of us were taught as children that such behavior wasn’t acceptable. We can only speculate how things might have been different had our parents been more open to the possibility that our claims were not just imaginary childhood nonsense or “kids being kids,” but were real experiences.

I also consider the reactions of other adults when it comes to these matters. Teachers, neighbors, and relatives will all affect a child when they react to a child’s claims of spirit contact. Children are impressionable, after all. Their interactions with the adults around them teach them what is acceptable behavior in society. If enough adults tell a child that he couldn’t have talked to Aunt Betty at the funeral home because she was lying dead in the casket, eventually, that child will learn to accept this as truth. Impressionable children may push away their unacceptable visions or communications with spirits because they don’t want to be laughed at or seen as weird.

Children also learn from adults’ fearful projections around spirits. When I refer to adults, I include the authors and filmmakers who tell scary stories about ghosts and hauntings. I understand these stories are designed for entertainment, but we must include books and films as contributing factors in teaching our youth about spiritual phenomena. In the same way that young children learn to fear mice from adults who scream at the sight of one, our tales of horror about the spirits of dead people are sure to stay in children’s minds. I praise the creators of Casper, the Friendly Ghost, and ParaNorman, who risked showing the world a different view.

Julie’s children swayed me to believe that even one open-minded parent can positively affect a child, which can offset the limiting beliefs projected by other adults. When asked if they tell other people about what their mother does for a living, all four of Julie’s children admitted that they are selective with whom they share this information. Each child told me in their separate interviews, using slightly different words, that “some people are not ready to believe.”

The good news is that society is undoubtedly shifting in our spiritual consciousness. It was commonplace in the late 90s and early 2000s that Melissa and I had to explain what a medium was to people in our conversations. Not anymore. Most people know what a medium is today. Furthermore, we now have friends and relatives who were once rock-solid skeptics but have now experienced successful readings with mediums. People’s minds are now open to new possibilities more than ever, and this societal shift has led to a change in attitude being passed down to our children.

Thanks for letting me share my early investigation experiences with you. I’d love to hear in the comment section what thoughts or memories this article inspired within you while reading it.

Love,
Bob

Bob Olson is the host of Afterlife TV, author of Answers About The Afterlife and The Magic Mala, and creator of the top directory of psychics, mediums, and animal communicators, BestPsychicDirectory.com. This is Bob Olson Connect, where you can read Bob’s articles before they become books.