Today I read an article (I think in a back issue of the Smithsonian magazine) that babies show an emotional response to their parents fighting even while they were sleeping.  Even behind closed doors when they aren’t consciously aware of anything, they’re picking up the vibes!  Dr. Gabor Mate writes a lot about how parental emotions can lead to a variety of symptoms in children even when all the parties involved are unaware of their emotions.

Often people think that if you don’t say something outright that people around you aren’t aware of what’s going on with you.  We drastically understate the ability of those around us to intuit beyond our words and sense things that are unspoken.  I don’t think of myself as highly intuitive and I frequently pick up on a lot of unspoken messages when speaking with people.  And our kids pick things up even more than we do, as they’ve been attuned to paying attention to the nonverbal cues of adults since they were born.

I’ve come to believe that there are invisible psychic cords that connect our thoughts to the minds of our children; this accounts for how they  they pick up many things we think they shouldn’t have awareness of without us ever saying a word.  So I wasn’t shocked when ds6 asked me this today.  He’s the same one who asked me about when he would die, a few days after Yirmiyahu almost died.  Yirmi’s medical situation wasn’t something that I ever talked to about him or with him around.  And yet he picked up on it.  I’ve recognized that I have very emotionally aware children – and that’s a blessing but also a challenge, as they are so attuned to the unspoken.  But unquestionably most children are much more aware than we want to believe.

That’s kind of scary, isn’t it?

Avivah