Finding Your Kid’s Intuition

How to help support your child in prioritizing their internal experience and follow their gut to a fulfilling life

I often tell parents that the greatest gift they can give their children is the ability to trust their intuition. When I say this, most parents agree. It sounds lovely — in theory. But the truth is most humans are roaming the planet unable to even hear their intuition, much less trust it. Therefore, they often miss the mark when trying to support their children in this endeavor.

What is an intuition? Your intuition is a subtle guide that walks with you throughout your life. It lives in the balance of self-awareness and awareness of the world around you, and always prioritizes your highest self (the wisest and most fulfilled version of yourself).

It is pretty easy to say we want our children to have a strong relationship with their intuition — heck, it even seems vital. But many well-meaning parents mistakenly sabotage their child from forming this relationship. Here are a few mistakes parents often make that hinder their child’s ability to trust their intuition:

1. Parents substitute their child’s intuition for their own. Many parents have the false belief that they need to protect their children from making mistakes or getting hurt. Because of this misunderstanding, they will substitute their child’s intuition with what they believe is best. Finding your intuition is like trying to find a whisper in a forest while blindfolded. It takes some exploring — and stumbling — to find. When parents step in too often and prevent their child from making decisions they need to make for themselves, they actually are distracting their child from finding their own intuition. The true role of a parent is to hold wide, safe boundaries and be a safe place to fall. Parents should only step in when imminent harm will come to their child. Otherwise, parents need to let their child stumble on the way to their intuition. After all, finding out what their intuition is not is just as important as finding out what it is.
2. Parents prioritize the external experience over the internal. I often hear parents say things like “my child used to self-harm but they are doing much better now, they stopped cutting and now they have all As”. It is tempting to assess another person’s well-being by the external factors we are aware of — heck, our society encourages it! But I encourage parents to shift their perspective a bit. When we make the internal experience the priority, we ask this question first: What does it feel like to be you? That same child could feel, internally, just as much turmoil making straight As as they felt when they were self-harming. When focusing on the internal experience, you can begin to find coping tools that actually improve their quality of life and address root issues instead of symptoms. Plus it feels really, really good for someone to care more about how you feel inside than simply finding symptoms that make other people less uncomfortable.
3. Parents don’t walk the walk. Most parents were not given the gift of trusting their intuition or prioritizing their internal experience prior to having children. Many of us were told during our formative years to stop crying, that we were too sensitive, or that nothing was wrong with Aunt Sally (who clearly had a problem with alcohol). When adults tell us what we feel inside isn’t “right”, we start to mistrust ourselves. We also start to replace “gut feelings” with “anxious feelings”. Over time we grow up, start our own families, and become numb to our internal experience. Gradually, our anxiety becomes our entire experience — so much so that we don’t even notice. It gnaws at us to push for a more demanding, higher paying job. It nags at us to fill our calendars because the voice only gets louder when we have down time. We become slaves to our “intuition”, believing that we are just one more goal away from peace. We’re following the wrong voice. Intuition is a gentle whisper, a calm knowing, that sounds something like this direction is closer to my highest self, whereas anxiety is high energy/emotion and sounds more like oh my god if we don’t live in this neighborhood our kids will be miserable! Many times parents need to do the work to decondition themselves from years of not prioritizing their internal experience or listening to their intuition before they can properly give that gift to their children.

I’ve shared a few things not to do in order to help your child find and trust their intuition. Here are a few things to do that will help both them and you:

1. Make it a practice in your home to check in with yourself regularly. I love to use the Mood Meter, developed by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to make an internal check easier. I recorded a podcast on how to check in with yourself and how to respond to emotions, listen to it if this feels like a foreign concept. Side note: Checking in with yourself does not mean asking yourself hourly/daily “Am I feeling bad about anything right now?” You would be surprised at how common that mistake is. Checking in with yourself looks like a neutral check in — “How am I feeling right now?” and it doesn’t matter if the answer is an unpleasant or a pleasant one, it’s just what is.
2. Make internal experiences a topic of conversation. When your child is weighing a decision, encourage them to prioritize how each decision would feel internally. Deeper than what others would applaud, understand, approve of, or benefit from — what decision would you make if no one was watching. I often applaud my teen clients for making the decision to drop AP courses, skip prom, or go to a less rigorous college. These aren’t always the “right” decisions for everyone, but often they are an indicator that my client is started to think of their internal experience over their external praise or reward. This often requires parents to think outside of the box and definitely outside of public opinion, but it is worth the effort.
3. Bet on your child. It is so easy in our high-paced, overachievement-obsessed society to worry that your child is slipping behind or going to fail at life. Our society paints such a narrow path to “success” and along both edges of that path are cliffs, so that if they were to stray just a little it will mean certain doom. That picture is false. Now more than ever, there are as many ways to create a fulfilling life as there are humans on this planet. When our child starts to make “mistakes” (or as I like to say, practice using their intuition) it is easy to get caught up in the moment and fear they will never recover. I want every parent to take a moment and pause. Remember a moment when you were in awe of your child. Their unique and precious personality shined through and you felt so grateful you get to see this human grow. Hold onto that feeling, and when your child is going through hard times remind yourself that you are betting on them. You believe they will find their way to a fulfilling life, and this mistake may just be the moment that, in hindsight, is a pivotal step along that path.

I hope this has been a friendly reminder that we should all be fighting to find our intuition and hold on tight to it. Like I said, the greatest gift we can give our children is the ability to trust their intuition… and we must lead by example.