H. S. Lewis - Your Sons and Daughters - Denying the Fourth Dimension
Now we know enough of child psychology to realize that the average child develops an amazing and wonderful faith in the integrity, learning, and unusual abilities of its parents. For a long period of child life, the average child looks upon its parents as though they were gods of wisdom and power. It is shocking to such a child to ever find its parents deceiving him, wilfully lying to him, or doing anything that is mean or sordid, or anything that borders upon deception. It is only natural then that when the parents tell their children that the fairies and invisible or ethereal things they have seen do not exist, the child mind will accept the word of the parents as law and will begin to doubt its own impressions.
As I have said, this is a great shock to the child mind, which has been gradually building up a faith in the ethereal things it has been seeing and hearing. Now it is confronted with the enormous task of shattering the world of psychic things to pieces, negating it, destroying it, and wiping it out of the consciousness. It is just as though we, as adults, were called upon to destroy or to deny and wipe out of our consciousness half of the material world in which we have placed so much faith.
When we, as adults, come to study the psychic laws and learn the real laws of nature, we do not have to eliminate from our consciousness many of the material things in which we have placed our faith, but generally we merely have to translate them into their proper terms without actually destroying them altogether. The child mind, on the other hand, has to completely eliminate and thereby destroy the psychic world, which has become so real to it.
When the child is old enough to play with many other children in the streets or in the parks, he also receives many jolts through hearing other children deny the existence of things in which he has placed his faith. And when it comes time for him to go to school, he is again surrounded on all sides by the acceptance of the materialistic world and the denial of the psychic.
We know from our own experiences that as we deny the existence of psychic impressions, and gradually discontinue our attunement with psychic impressions, we lose the keen functioning of our psychic faculties; they gradually become dormant until they cease to function altogether. This is why we, as adults, have such a difficulty later in life in reawakening these faculties and in developing a psychic attunement that is equal to what we had as children.