The Psychic Child
by Kay Robinson

All children are psychic. Their spiritual abilities are open and available to them. Unfortunately, children learn very early on to not use these abilitiesÑ to not trust them, to turn them off.

As a parent, it is often hard to watch, listen and communicate with a child while recognizing that they have spiritual gifts. The first inclination we have (mostly coming from how we were raised) is to invalidate those gifts. When a child tells you they see something that will happen in the future, our first thought is to say they don't know that it's true. If they talk about a place they have never been, we want to correct them. If they talk about a spirit, we tell them no one is there.

Parenting a psychic child means recognizing and seeing them as spirit. The spirit is learning how to communicate and create through the new body. During this process, they learn through their communications with you, the parent. They learn to trust what they see and know, or they learn not trust. They learn to use their spiritual gifts, or to shut them down. The ethics, rules and etiquette that we teach a child will give them the freedom to know themselves and use their abilities, or will control them so they behave in ways that everyone will like and can handle.

As a child, I remember seeing and knowing things that frightened my mother. Her fear made me uncomfortable, so I stopped seeing and knowing these things. One morning I woke up and Ôknew' there was a fire at a farm house somewhere nearby. I could Ôsee' the farmhouse clearly. I just did not recognize which house it was. When I told my mother about it, she told me not to say such things and not to wish such a thing on anyone! The intensity of her response made me feel guilty. What had I done? I wasn't sure, but it was clear that whatever I had done was wrong.

Later on that morning, we went into town. The siren at the fire station went off as we drove by. Volunteer firemen came out of houses, jumped on the fire trucks and were off to a fire. Shortly after the trucks left, another volunteer fireman arrived late. He asked my mother if she would drive him to the fire. So, off we went. As we approached the scene, I was horrified. I saw the farmhouse on fire exactly as I had seen it that morning. For the past seventeen years I have been a teacher at the Berkeley Psychic Institute. I have had the opportunity to talk to many people, children as well as adults. Most everyone has a story or two to tell validating the fact that they were intuitive, clairvoyant or a healer from a very early age. And, all are very sure that these abilities caused them some unwanted reactions and attention along the way.

For many years, the Berkeley Psychic Institute operated a school for psychic children called the Yin Yang Seminary. One of my children had the opportunity to attend this school from preschool through first grade. Children were encouraged to use their spiritual gifts, including clairvoyance, clairaudiance, and healing. They were taught the spiritual tools of meditation and healing alongside their academics.

When my daughter began public school at the age of seven, she was aware that the energy of the new school was very different from the Yin Yang school, and that here, she might not be able to talk about what she saw and knew intuitively. After the first day, she told me that in her new school you weren't supposed to use your psychic tools. She knew that she would be considered Ôstrange' if she did. The pressure to be the same as the other children was intense.

Psychic children are sensitive to energy. They are aware not only of what they see and know in present time: They are aware of their past lives as well. I recall when my son and I moved to Orinda when he was four years old. As we drove into town he declared, ''This reminds me of when I was in Japanese.'' As a parent of a psychic child, I knew he was referring to a past life memory and I saw what he meant. As you enter this town, you are aware of many small rolling hills in lush green that looks very much like some areas in Japan. Children who allow themselves to use their spiritual awareness often make references to past life experiences. Parents and educators who are not aware of this spiritual gift may invalidate the child, telling them that they know the child never had the experience they just described. If I were not aware psychically, I might have told my son that he had never been to Japan, invalidating his awareness.

Children are clairvoyant. They have the ability to see energy and pictures. I thoroughly enjoy being around young children who have not turned off these abilities. These young children will read the aura of whoever is near them, often embarrassing the adult they catch off guard. In a store one day, a four year old child sitting in a grocery cart was watching the checker work on her mother's order. She suddenly burst out, ''Why are you so mad?'' The mother and clerk were both caught off guard and embarrassed. The clerk quickly discounted what the child said, ''I am not mad!'' The mother at the same time hushed her child, ''You shouldn't say that to the lady.'' Double whammy! The child learned that saying what she saw got a reaction she did not expect. The message: she had done something wrong.

As a child, how many times did you see or know that something was bothering your mother or your father and you asked them what was wrong? In response, they denied it, saying everything was just fine, fine, fine! Did this cause you not to trust what you saw? Did it teach you not to communicate about it?

Another gift children have is healing. I've often counseled mothers who are worried that their children are too sensitive. When I look at it clairvoyantly, I often see that the child is a healer. If not given permission to learn to use this ability, they heal by taking energy into their own auraÑ becoming the effect of the energy that they were trying to heal. In Yin Yang Seminary, the children were taught to use their healing abilities so that they did not have to take the energy into themselves.

Recently, a group of eight kids who went to Yin Yang together got together for a day of fun! They were playing outside when one of them fell and scrapped her knee pretty badly. The children came inside while I attempted to do some first aid. The injured child was upset and having a hard time with the messy look of the scrape, so much so that she would not allow me to help. To the rescue were two of the other kids. I watched as they used their healing information to ground the girl, release the fear, bring her back into her body (they said she was up in a tree as a spirit, watching) and close down her chakras. Within a minute the girl was calm and ready for me to work with her knee. I was truly in awe of the certainty and enthusiasm these children had in using their healing information.

Healing brings great joy to a child. They have the ability to heal themselves and to use that ability when those around them let them play with it. One afternoon, several girls got together and decided to gather materials to make ''healing sticks.'' The materials consisted of the all important stick, feathers, beads, ribbon, buttons and most anything that was bright in color. I watched as they enthusiastically decorated their sticks then proudly declared them ''healing sticks.'' For several days after that, they used those sticks to heal everything in sight; their parents, their pets and each other. During this time, one child was a house guest with us while her parents were on a spiritual pilgrimage to Egypt. She began to complain of a stomachache that was getting worse. I offered some assistance, but instead, she wanted to try out her new healing stick. She waved the stick over the area of discomfort while she talked about what she saw. Soon, she said that her parents missed her and were worried about her. She sent them a spirit- to -spirit ''hello'' and with the stick, took their energy out of her tummy. When she was finished, the discomfort was gone she proudly declared herself healed by her wonderful healing stick. She added that she thought her parents were going to call from Egypt that night. The call came in from them about an hour later. (The little girl was just as proud of her precognition as she was of her healing.)

Manifestation is another spiritual gift children enjoy. My daughter was about six years old when she decided that she wanted a piano, a white one. Whenever we went shopping, she would take me into the music store and show me this lovely white spinet piano. She told me that she wanted this piano. I had learned many years before from my son that when a child tells you they want something, it is not necessarily a request for you to provide it for them. Often, it is simply them stating what they are in the process of creating, or manifesting. So, I just agreed with her and told her it was a lovely piano and that I thought she would enjoy playing it. A month later we received a phone call from a women we knew, casually asking if we would take her piano into our home while she traveled through Europe for a year. I smiled in amusement and, of course, agreed to take the piano. When I told my daughter that a piano was coming she did not seem surprised, though she was very excited and said that she couldn't wait to play her new white spinet piano. It concerned me that she might be disappointed if the piano was other than a white spinet. A week later, I almost cried when I saw the movers bring a white spinet piano to our home!

One young mother told me about her son's ability to manifest. They were in a grocery store when her son saw a toy gun hanging on one of the racks. He asked her if he could have it. She had no interest in buying him a gun, but she did not want to interfere with his ability to create things for himself. She told him that he could have the gun and that she did not want to buy it. This answer seemed to agree with him. A minute or so later as he was riding on the bottom of the grocery cart, he noticed a ten dollar bill on the floor. He got out of the cart, showed the bill to this mother, and began looking around to see to whom it belonged. When he and his mother realized that there was no one around, he turned to his mother and said, ''Now can I have my gun.''

Precognition, the ability to see something in the future, is probably the spiritual gift that upsets parents the most, especially if the event the child sees is an unpleasant one. A ten year old once told me of a dream he had in which he saw his mother's uncle having a stroke. He told his mother about his dream because it upset him. It upset her as well. She yelled at him for saying such a thing. The next day, his mother received the call about her uncle and his stroke. The boy was terrified by his precognition, as was his mother. In a workshop for parents of psychic children, his mother learned about her son's spiritual gifts and his need to be recognized and validated, rather than punished, for his abilities.

One of the best known and most talked about spiritual gifts a child has is the ability to talk to spirit. Psychologists have dealt with many families about the dilemma of ''imaginary'' playmates. From the perspective of a clairvoyant, these are not imaginary playmates, rather, they are spirits without bodies that the child sees, talks to and plays with. One little girl told her mother about a spirit that was in her room whose name was Finiger. The girl talked to and played with this spirit, even setting a place at the dinner table for her friend. After several days she told her mother that she was tired of playing with Finiger. Her mother simply told her to ask Finiger to leave and to find another person to play with. The girl was delighted with this solution. Finiger went his merry way and was no longer a guest in their house.

Often you will see a baby or a young child crying or Ôacting out'. A parent's immediate response is to quiet the child. As a psychic parent, I am aware that the baby or the child is often communicating about an energy that is uncomfortable or frightening to them. The parent becomes upset because the child is crying which creates yet another uncomfortable energy in the child's space. I see this happen in classes I teach. Mothers will sometimes bring their baby or young child to class with them. The baby cries and the mother gets into a dilemma. Teaching the mother to communicate to the child by recognizing the energy they are complaining about and helping the child with the energy rather than controlling their crying is a tremendous relief to the mother and to the child!

Children want their psychic abilities recognized. They want to understand and to use those abilities. Parents of psychic children can best help their child by understanding the abilities that they themselves have. If you have a psychic child, chances are you were a psychic child as well. You know the old saying, ''The fruit never falls very far from the tree.''

The Berkeley Psychic Institute teaches classes in meditation and healing. There, you can learn about your abilities. From that space, you can begin to see and recognize your own spiritual gifts, and the abilities of your psychic child.

Kay Robinson is a teacher of graduate programs at the Berkeley Psychic Institute.