Empathic Babies, Children, and Teens
By Yvonne Perry
Empathy is what makes other people matter to us and reminds us to acknowledge the people around us as we understand and share their feelings. Empathy exists in early mother-infant bonding. Even before birth, a baby in the womb is sensitive to the mother’s feelings, whether positive, neutral, or negative. Once born, a baby shows receptivity to both parents’ anger, tension, and depression, as well as their caring, responsiveness, and love.
You’ve probably noticed how they imitate your facial expressions, smiling in response to your smile. They also may cry if they hear another baby cry. This type of response is a step in the development of empathy and the ability to share the feelings of another person.
Babies absorb the mental and emotional energy of the people around them. They don’t filter anything; they simply receive. As a child ages, this empathic tendency may increase and get out of control. Some children pick up the emotions, energy, or thoughts of others to the degree that it becomes overwhelming and interrupts the development of their social and emotional life.
Because these children do not know how to set personal boundaries (or that they need to), they do not realize when they are in another person’s mental or emotional space, much less how invasive this can be to that person. It can also lower the child’s own vibrational level.
An empath is sensitive to what is obvious as well as unseen things such as ghosts and the thoughts, emotions, and illnesses they sense around them. Empaths may get hunches, see mental pictures, hear voices, or have a gut feeling that supplies hidden information about people and situations. They may also get a physical sensation in their body that lets them know where another person is afflicted or suffering.
You may have heard of Indigo Children or Crystal Kids who have intuitive gifts that surprise or even astound adults. These empathic children easily pick up on the feelings and thoughts of adults and others as they unconsciously reach into human and spirit energy fields to gather information and understand things around them. Seeing with their spiritual eyes, feeling with their spiritual senses, hearing with their spiritual ears, they may give information about a past life, tell of events before they happen, see ghosts, or know something about another person or situation that no one else does. Today, as many as one in four children have this ability and are tuned into the higher frequency all the time.