A client once asked me how to parent an intuitive child. She told me of her daughter’s many intuitive visions and senses, and mentioned one time in particular that confirmed her child was spiritually gifted:

One night, her daughter woke from a deep sleep in which she heard sirens and felt strapped to her bed. The next morning, the family received news that her grandfather had fallen in the middle of the night, and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. During his ride, the grandfather was strapped into a stretcher and felt uncomfortably confined.

This wasn’t the first time I had heard about a child’s intuitive ability. In fact, it’s not unusual for a child to remember their previous life, see an angel, or have clear inner guidance about what to do. So how can you tell whether your child is intuitive? And what should you do as a parent to support and cultivate this gift? Read on for tips and answers, and then download my Free Guide to the Four Aspects of Intuition to begin your journey to more mindful parenting.

Characteristics of an Intuitive Child

Intuition is a very natural 6th sense, and most people have it. We all know that people take in information through sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. But did you know that you also take in information through your sensory body? Especially children. The reason: Children are closer to Source than adults who have been on the planet longer. This makes them highly intuitive.

Now, most children are sensitive in that they have empathy and feel the emotional temperature around them. But there’s a difference between a sensitive child and an intuitive child. Characteristics of intuitive children include:

• Having a very special mission to serve with their healer light in this world.
• Being highly developed in the 4 aspects of intuition: hearing, seeing, feeling, and knowing (covered in my latest free download).
• Having a gifted mind for science, art, music, or creative expression.
• Getting derailed by picking up everything around them and not having a clear way to filter what is there from what isn’t.

How they serve will depend on their inborn skills or creative genius. Your job is to help your child recognize their unique gift, allowing them to feel nurtured so that they may embody this light and who they are. Why? So that their personal gift becomes a gift to the world.

Parenting an Intuitive Child Starts with You

It’s possible that your child gets her intuition from you or her other parent. It’s also possible that your child is not like either of you or has a Divine mission of her own. Therefore, it’s imperative that you gain some awareness about intuition as a whole.

Now remember, intuition has only been an “on the table” subject over the last 10 to 20 years. So it’s not common that, as a child, you were taught how to have energetic or emotional boundaries either. This is a newer conversation.

Needless to say, parenting an intuitive child takes some awareness. Just like giving yourself the oxygen mask before giving it to your child, you must first pay particular attention to your own gifts before being able to fully help your child. Therefore, let’s start with the following 7 questions about YOU:

1. Did you feel seen, heard, or connected with as a child?

Maybe the roof was over your head and the meals were on the table, but were you seen for who you are and given the chance to BE? Where your gifts nurtured? If your answer is no, then in order to understand your intuitive child, you must understand your gifts. That includes the light you came into this world with and how you live that light in the world. As you see your own, you will see more clearly your child’s gifts and that he/she may be called to walk an unbeaten path or to trail blaze. Your child might not meet the expectations put on him or her because there’s something more powerful and true that needs to come through to help the world. What would it feel like to see, hear, and connect with your child as you would like to be seen, heard, and connected with?

2. Were your boundaries crossed as a child?

Did you feel responsible for others’ emotions and guilty if you did anything for yourself? OR were you in or around emotional volatility? To an intuitive child, the auric field is more sensitive. Sensitive or intuitive children often pick up the emotions of others around them. So, an intuitive child needs to be TAUGHT emotional boundaries. One way to do that is to allow the child to have his/her feelings. Affirming to an intuitive child that it is perfectly appropriate and OK to feel anger or sadness will help the child have an understanding of his/her own emotions so that your child can be around other children or adults who have feelings. The child can then differentiate his/her own feelings from the other person’s feelings. Be careful to not over-rescue your child from his/her feelings. Comfort is one thing, but rescuing your child from feeling a hard feeling crosses their boundary in understanding their own emotions.

3. Did you over-empathize with others’ feelings as a child?

Were you the pleaser, or the one to make sure everyone was OK. Were you OK if everyone around you was OK? An empathic, intuitive child will feel into others’ needs before his/her own, and it’s important that the child knows that who they are and how they feel is important.

4. Were/are you a visionary?

Do you see the bigger picture? Do you have great ideas, visions, dreams about what could be? Do you see higher perspectives? If so, you have an aspect of clairvoyant intuition. This is seeing the higher vision. It shows up differently for many intuitives, but perhaps to you see this sense in your child. He/she has visions, dreams, or a higher knowing about a situation. Perhaps he/she “sees” things.

5. Did you feel grounded as a child?

Just like adults, intuitive children need grounding. Grounding includes stability, an environment they trust, wholesome food, sleep, the outdoors, and routine in which they know what to expect. This will help their nervous system settle. If an intuitive child does not feel grounded, their visions, emotions, or awareness can be heightened and anxiety can ensue. Although there are many reasons for anxiety, at times it can result from energetic or emotional overwhelm. Grounding yourself as a parent around your child helps your intuitive child ground. You can ground yourself by sitting for a few minutes each day, breathing and settling into your legs and feet. As you ground, you make more grounded choices for you and for your child. Your intuitive child will sense that you are grounded, and that will help your child feel more self-confident and connected to him/herself.

7. Were you validated?

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with who were intuitive children and were told they had a gift when they were young, only to find that they couldn’t relate to anyone their age. They felt their gift was a curse. Validating an intuitive child’s sense of themselves, and their accomplishments without glorifying their intuitive abilities before they know what to do with them will help your child normalize intuition. Intuition is very normal, but modern society is still catching up on accepting it as normal. Simply validate what your child is sensing and seeing. If the child is old enough, questions are a great way to allow your child to process what they think and feel. In the situation with my client, she said to her daughter “How incredible that you woke up from your dream and Grandpa had almost the same experience. What do you make of that?” Sometimes, children just need to give a voice to or process what they are experiencing. Listening is very validating to them.

Learn the Aspects of Intuition to More Fully Understand and Support Your Child

By now, you probably know that intuition is your best guide when it comes to parenting. We hear this from mothers, grandmothers, parenting books, and we experience it for ourselves on a daily basis. But parenting an intuitive child takes a different skill set, a deeper knowing, and a heightened awareness of who your child truly is. That’s why I invite you to go a step further and dive more deeply into developing your own intuition so that you can become a better, more supportive parent. Your first step entails learning about the 4 aspects of intuition. This will allow you to begin seeing how intuition shows up within you. Gain this insight, and knowing how to parent your intuitive child will seem second nature.