Young children NDEs: Long excerpt #15a

Radiation oncologist Jeremy Long writes in his article, "Evidence for Survival of Consciousness in Near-Death Experiences: Decades of Science and New Insights" - "An important line of evidence for the reality of near-death experiences and its consistent message of the afterlife comes from investigating the NDEs of very young children. If NDE content is significantly culturally determined or based on prior life experiences, then very young children should have NDE content quite different from older children and adults. However, that is not what investigations by myself and others found. I previously published a study comparing the content of NDEs in very young children with older children and adults. I compared the NDEs of 26 children with NDEs occurring at age five and younger with 585 NDEs that occurred at age six and older. The average age of the five-year-old and younger group at the time of their NDEs was 3.6 years old. Responses to 33 survey questions from the prior version of the NDERF survey regarding the content of the NDEs were compared. This study concluded:

Very young children had every NDE element that older children and adults had. There was no statistically significant difference in the responses to any of the thirty- three survey questions regarding the content of the NDEs between very young children and older children and adults. There were only two questions with a trend toward a statistically different response between the two groups.

"This prior study was replicated with data from the most recent version of the NDERF survey that included 34 survey questions regarding the content of near-death experiences. This investigation compared NDEs occurring in 33 children age five and younger with 798 NDEs that happened at age six and older. The average age of the five-year-old and younger group at the time of their NDEs was 3.8 years old. Three NDEs were excluded as information about their age when their NDEs occurred was not available. The criteria for statistical significance were the same as was used for the study of non-Western NDEs reported in the previous section. The full text of all 33 NDEs occurring in children, age five and younger, is available on the NDERF website.

"There were no statistically significant differences in responses to any of the 34 survey questions between the two groups. There were only three survey questions with borderline statistically significant different answers between the two groups. Very young children near-death experiencers were borderline statistically more likely to respond to the survey question, 'Did you see deceased or religious spirits?' with a response of 'No.' Very young children NDErs were also borderline statistically more likely to respond 'No' to the question, 'Did you encounter or become aware of any beings who previously lived on earth who are described by name in religions (for example: Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.)?' Young children NDErs also were borderline statistically significantly more likely to reply 'Uncertain' to the survey question, 'Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure?' For the other 31 survey questions, there were no statistical or borderline statistical differences in the responses between the two groups.

"Understandably, very young children might be less likely to encounter deceased or religious spirits, and beings from religions during their near-death experiences due to their young age. They may not have lived long enough to be aware of or understand religious beings."

Jeffrey Long, MD, "Evidence for Survival of Consciousness in Near-Death Experiences: Decades of Science and New Insights." In the next several posts I will share excerpts from Long's 2021 article. Footnotes have been deleted. The complete text is available as a pdf at https://www.nderf.org.