Many of us feel instinctively that newborn babies come into the world "trailing clouds of glory" as William Wordsworth put it -- if not memories of a higher plane, at least an innocent openness and capacity for intuitive knowledge. Like Wordsworth, we sense that "heaven lies about us in our infancy." As parents and caregivers, we want to help our children maintain the buoyant sense of well-being that results from this direct connection to their own souls and inner wisdom. But too often, as children grow up, the connection to this inner realm is lost. Like any other childhood ability, intuition fades when it is not recognized and nurtured. Psychiatrist Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, says the only way children

learn to identify what they feel or know is by having that feeling seen, understood and "mirrored" by a caregiver. If a parent ignores or disapproves of certain feelings, Miller says, the child forgets or suppresses them. In the same way, when we tell children who report intuitive experiences, "Don't be silly," or "Don't make things up," they learn to ignore their inner truth. Psychologists, teachers, and intuition trainers agree that the best thing we can do to strengthen children's intuition is to listen to them. That sounds easy enough. But the blinding pace of modern life makes it difficult to sit back, accept our children for who they are, and find out what gifts they have brought with them into the world. Instead, we rush at the baby, and later the child, telling her who to be rather than watching and waiting as she unfolds. In the face of this, says psychologist Thomas Armstrong, author of Awakening Your Child's Natural Genius and The Radiant Child, a child's true self withdraws. "If you don't accept a child for who they really are," he says, "they go inside, lose themselves and develop an entirely false front." Creating a nurturing and secure environment is the best thing a parent can do to encourage intuitive ability in a young child. Popular pediatrician and author T. Berry Brazelton says that freedom from serious emotional distress is necessary for a child to develop intuition. "Children use something like intuition all the time to monitor their environment," he says, "but it can only come up when they are (emotionally) free." According to author Joseph Chilton Pearce, a child who feels threatened by her environment cannot risk paying attention to her own inner reality -- a problem that he believes is exacerbated by frightening images on television. Our children are "hyperalert to the external world," says Pearce. "How then can they screen out the outer world and attend to what's inside?" Daniel Goleman, psychology reporter for the New York Times and author of the best selling book Emotional Intelligence, points out that recent research shows that negative emotions such as anger, frustration, and fear, trigger the release of chemicals that "jams the circuits" in the brain, blocking intellectual and intuitive discovery and growth.