It is True – The Children Know More than You Think

By Victoria Pendragon

The Jesuits of centuries ago are reputed to have said, “Give me a child till he’s seven years old and he will be mine for life.” The Jesuits didn’t have access to the wealth of scientific information that we have at our disposal today but, as it turns out, they were dead right. It hasn’t been all that long that we’ve known about the rate of cellular turn-over in the body – the time it takes for every cell in the body to have replaced itself. However ,the information about our brains and the neural pathways that carry and connect all the information we take in is far more recent.

In a nutshell, our brains are functioning even before we are born…and we can hear in utero as well. This means that before we even open our eyes into a world of information our neural pathways are already recording information about life; much of that information is feeling information. A growing child in utero is affected by every chemical change in its mother’s body as every emotion she experiences causes a chemical change which is, in turn, experienced – and recorded – by the brain and body of her small passenger. The old dictum, “Happy mother, happy baby,” turns out to have real validity.

Even before birth, the children know more than you would think.

Once a child is born – and for the first four years of its life – its neural pathways will multiply at a rate that is never duplicated again. The next three years may come close, but after that, the process maintains a pretty regular pace. If you couple that explosion of internal information technology with the fact that infant brains have no real capacity for monitoring themselves – no ability to censor or modulate input – then you have a small being that is, essentially, an information sponge, soaking up everything in its environment : good and bad, sensible and nonsensical, rational and irrational.

In addition to this, the small being is also far more aware than you may suspect. Children, especially those who are below the age of six, are exceedingly sensitive to emotional environments. Do not think that you can hide anything from a child; you cannot. Only recently in their little lives, feeling was all that they did and they were chemically tied into those feelings, linked to the ups and downs of the much larger creature that was nourishing them. They are masters of feeling feelings. Children know.  And while they may not be equipped to interpret the feelings they sense, they nevertheless take them in along with the visual circumstances that surround the feelings, forming an informational gestalt that becomes a part of their cellular consciousness.

This gestalt may not have a name, it may be a complete mystery to them, but it will go on to inform what they eventually perceive as ‘life.’ So in another 25 years, when they find themselves in an intimate relationship with someone, they may be astound by responding to that person in certain very particular circumstances in ways that they will not understand simply because the information their wonderful and amazing bodies have carried around with them for decades, information unconsciously gleaned from their parent’s behavior, has finally found a place to be.

In addition to absorbing feeling information, children also absorb verbal content that may, at the time they absorb it, mean nothing to them. Parents of very young children often feel free to discuss all kinds of rather serious things that they might not discuss in front of an older child simply because they ‘know’ that the younger child ‘does not understand’ what they are saying. The information may be about finances or health or some other important matter but if there is any emotion around the conversation at all, that very young child has now absorbed those emotions in relation to the words as well as the words themselves and has formed a new gestalt for its grown-up self. A gestalt that might tell it that life is hard, that making enough money to survive on is almost impossible, that he or she will be saddled with some particular physical problem for life.

Our bodies remember everything that we see, hear, touch, taste, smell or feel emotionally. They remember it not just in the neural pathways but in every cell of the body. This is why, if you ever have serious bodywork done, the therapist may come across areas of extreme pain or discomfort, because the body is holding something in that area, trying to contain it. This is why we can think no thought that is untainted by the life we have experienced, especially by those first seven years. When cells divide and replicate, so too does the information they carry; we are our histories right up until we learn that we can de-fuse the emotional content around the information through the use of various energy psychologies.

But why saddle your offspring with more eventual therapy than he or she will probably need anyway, the vagaries of life being as they are, when knowing what you know, you can take on the responsibility yourself for your own programming and behavior and transform yourself into the best you that you can be in order to support the development of this new life form, one that will be part of a new, more conscious way of living on earth. Parents will always have disagreements; their children will always feel that, but why not commit to learning how to respectfully disagree so that the child will learn how to better conflict, in every cell of its growing body, and one day become a person who knows how to handle such exchanges with reason and gentleness.

Life is filled with challenges and there is no better way to raise a child than to display for them the best possible way to meet these challenges, whatever they may be. Take responsibility and lovingly raise a more balanced and healthy child who can grow up to be a balanced and healthy adult in a better world.

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About the Author

Victoria Pendragon, BFA, DD is an everyday mystic, a writer and an artist. Her book, Sleep Magic, Surrender to Success, is a guide to do-it-yourself emotional cellular reprogramming. She can be seen on her You Tube series, My Alternate Reality ( http://youtu.be/pIxDZwO0FKM ) or contacted via her website: www.VictoriaPendragon.com