H. S. Lewis - Your Sons and Daughters - The world of your child
To the young child, the world is at least half-psychic and half-material, and to these young minds, the psychic world is just as real and just as natural and normal as the objective world is to most adults.
This is why young children are easily interested in fairy stories and in stories that contain what some adults call the wildest dreams of fancy. It is not difficult to tell a story of faintly visible fairies and slightly transparent persons moving about in space, or of fantastic or beautiful worlds and lands, for the child often sees such slightly visible or transparent characters floating about in space, and has beautiful visions of fairylands of which we, in our older years, know nothing unless we, too, have redeveloped and reawakened our psychic faculties.
Many children who seem to be lost in silence and deep reverie while at play are really in attunement with some psychic conditions, which they are observing and studying, and possibly analyzing. The first great shock that comes to these children is a gradual realization that the adults around them, and especially their parents, do not see or hear the same things that they see and hear. The next shock is when the children begin to speak of the strange and beautiful things they hear and see, and their parents or other adults tell them that they are mistaken and that such things do not exist, and that it is only the imagination at work.
Here, the child is confronted with believing what the parents say, and thereby becomes convinced that for some reason or other its own little mind has been creating false and non-existing things, or the child must believe that the parents are greatly mistaken, and that his own little mind is correct.