The Subconscious Mind for Kids
The subconscious mind develops early in life, largely through experience rather than language.
In the first years of life — roughly from birth to around seven — children learn about the world primarily through sensation, emotion, repetition, and relationship. During this period, the brain is especially receptive to patterns: how safety is felt, how stress is responded to, and what helps things settle again.
This learning does not occur through conscious reasoning. It happens through lived experience — through repeated states in the body, emotional tone, and relational interaction.
Over time, these experiences form an internal reference system. They shape expectations, emotional responses, and automatic reactions that operate beneath conscious awareness. This form of implicit, body-based learning is commonly referred to as the subconscious mind.
As children move toward middle childhood, their capacity for reflection, symbolic thinking, and language for inner experience increases. This developmental shift allows patterns to be noticed, named, and engaged with, rather than simply lived inside.
Working With the Subconscious in Children Aged Seven and Over
Because much subconscious learning forms early and outside of language, approaches that engage with it often differ from purely cognitive or talk-based methods.
In this practice, work with the subconscious may involve gently exploring beliefs that have formed through experience — particularly beliefs related to safety, capability, or self-worth. These beliefs are understood not as truths, but as learned responses that once served a protective or organising function.
With children, this may include noticing beliefs such as “I’m bad,” “I can’t do this,” or “Something is wrong with me,” and introducing alternative, strength-based beliefs that feel more supportive and relevant to the child’s current context.
At times, attention may also be brought to experiences that were stressful or overwhelming. This is not done to analyse or relive the past, but to allow the brain to revisit these experiences in a more integrated or “whole-brain” state, where emotional, sensory, and cognitive information can be held together rather than organised around threat.
Change is understood to occur through experience rather than effort. The emphasis is not on fixing behaviour or correcting emotion, but on supporting conditions in which new associations and patterns can gradually become possible.
Explaining the Subconscious Mind to Children
When speaking with children about the subconscious mind, simple and concrete language is used. Children are often introduced to the idea in this way.
There is a part of your mind that thinks, talks, and makes decisions. And there is another part that learned earlier — before you had words for everything.
This part remembers how things felt.
It remembers what helped and what didn’t.
It notices patterns and tries to keep you safe.
Sometimes it reacts quickly, before you have time to think.
Sometimes it brings up feelings that don’t seem to match what’s happening right now.
This does not mean something is wrong. It means a part of your mind is doing what it learned to do.
Children are supported to understand that not all reactions are not choices they are making on purpose, and that change happens through experience rather than control or effort. Over time, with enough safety and support, new patterns can form.
Related Resources
Navigating Parenting through the Subconscious Mind: PSYCH-K & Re-Parenting
When Experience Becomes Evidence: On Judgment, Worth, and Surveillance
Important Information
This article offers a reflective, research-informed overview of how the subconscious mind is understood within this practice. It is not intended to diagnose, assess, or treat mental health conditions. Any complementary practices referenced are offered as non-clinical, reflective processes and are not a substitute for counselling, therapeutic, or medical care.
References
Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.
Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are.
Perry, B. D. (2006). Applying principles of neurodevelopment to clinical work with children and adolescents.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain.
