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May/June 2009 Spirituality
Living with Highly Intuitive Kids

by Catherine Crawford

Do you have a highly intuitive child or teenager? Read the following 10 traits and check those that apply to your child.

• My teen has a way of finishing my sentences and reading my thoughts.
• She has an ability to "see" things before they happen and is surprised that other people respond to her predictions with amazement.
• My teen frequently translates the needs of younger siblings and pets for me and is surprisingly perceptive.
• Noisy, crowded events agitate him and it takes him a long time to bounce back after such disruptions.
• My child "catches" others' emotions or upset moods almost like a cold.
• He is prone to headaches and stomachaches related to other people's stress.
• My teen feels tension during traumatic world events, maybe even drawing pictures of them or spontaneously talking about them with no knowledge of the events.
• It is hard to keep a secret or surprise from her - she routinely guesses her birthday presents, for example.
• My child has a tendency to have insights about other people and the world that outpace developmental norms.
• She reports feeling different from her peers.

If most of these qualities ring true for your child, your teen may be an intuitive empath, or a highly intuitive child. We are all intuitive and capable of empathy, but intuitive empaths possess these abilities more than most people. Intuition involves the ability to pick up on subtle information that is not perceived directly through any of the five senses, but rather is detected through an invisible sixth sense.

Empathy is the ability to tune in to how another person is feeling by registering those feelings through the body. Intuitive empaths experience these ways of perceiving the world through an extra-magnified lens.

As the parent of an intuitive empath, you may be running up against some unusual parenting challenges that are not readily discussed in most parenting books. For instance, what do you do when your teen can tell you're having a conflict with your spouse, even when you and your spouse have been tight-lipped? What do you tell your child when he has intuitions of danger that turn out to be accurate? How can you help an intuitive child when he feels a friend's pain so deeply he can't shake it off, absorb so much of a classroom's stress during the day that he has trouble falling asleep at night, gets confused by conflicts and thinks that another person's feelings are actually his own, and even feels the pain of the world?

Support Your Intuitive Teen

As parents and adults involved in nurturing intuitive kids, we can make a big difference in supporting intuition and empathy by giving positive feedback for these abilities. By helping kids learn how to deal with the stressors that can emerge from living with heightened intuitive abilities, you can teach them real life skills designed with their abilities in mind.

Here are ways you can support an intuitive teen:

• Stay open to her perceptions without judgment.
• Try not to inflate or deflate her intuitive experience when you respond to it.
• Help her see that her way of feeling and seeing life is an important part of who she is - just like any other gift or talent.
• Remember that these abilities are fundamental to your child's natural intelligence.
• Let your child know he is never alone and that you're available to help him problem solve his intuitive and empathic stressors.
• If he has empathically "taken on" someone else's mood, aches, pains or worries, help him to practice asking "Is this feeling mine?" Remind him that he's not responsible for someone else's feelings.
• If your teen is stuck in a pattern of being very in-tune to others or to the pain of the world, then help your child switch to being on the "self channel." You can do this with exercise, by encouraging him to express his feelings in art, or even by taking a couple of slow deep breaths with you.

Intuitive empathy is not really a choice in a teen. It is an innate lens through which the child perceives life - and it deserves respect and support.

Catherine Crawford, LMFT, ATR, author of The Highly Intuitive Child, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and registered art therapist specializing in the needs of intuitive empath children and adults. Visit www.lifepassage.com.