When my oldest son was four, we visited my mother. We stayed about six weeks and he turned five while we were there.
He had an undiagnosed medical condition, so he was a skinny little kid. Actually, both my sons were skinny when they were little but my younger son has a different build and people didn't hassle him about it.
My younger son later put on weight, but I once saw an old photo of him and was shocked at how prominent his collar bone was at a young age because no one ever hassled him about being a bag of bones. He had a bigger bone structure and wild curly hair making his head look huge and people missed the fact that he was actually quite skinny.
He's extremely introverted and didn't tell me at the time that he was intentionally gaining weight. Years later, he mentioned it was intentional. He said he was tired of being cold all the time and at age nine or whatever decided to just eat extra until he stopped feeling cold all the time, so he's been on the chubby side at times.
My mom grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. Like every German lady I ever met of a certain age, mom fed everyone who walked in the door.
In my mom's case, there was no means to convince her "This is the US and there's no war here. Almost no one dies of starvation here. Even homeless people average two meals a day and literally starving to death pretty much never happens."
So during this one visit home, mom was chasing my skinny little four year old around all afternoon feeding him cookies and such because she felt he was too skinny. Then when he didn't want to eat dinner, it was somehow MY fault and I was a bad mom.
It was so bad, my sister actually spoke up and defended me, telling mom "We don't have this problem at MY house." My sister routinely looked for excuses to take digs at me, possibly because I'm "the pretty sister" and never mind there's a long history of people having trouble telling us apart, so we don't really look all that different, and here she was objecting to Teh Crazeh because it was so completely over the top.
My son remembers that period and the story he tells when it comes up in conversation is that he wandered into the kitchen and grandma was there ready to pounce and he defended himself as a four year old from being fed more junk food with announcing he was there to get a banana, grabbing a banana and fleeing my mother's presence.
Shortly after we got back home, I could tell he was having trouble with what had happened. So I sat him down and told him "Grandma grew up in a war zone. She's kind of cracked and just a hair crazy about certain things."
He breathed a sigh of relief and stopped being wrapped around the axle about it. He later told me that me telling him WHY she was off -- that she grew up in a war zone -- helped him figure out how to navigate her crap and decide what to blow off as "Grandma is crazy." and when to take my very smart and competent mother seriously.
My mom often said things that weren't common knowledge, but sometimes it was brilliantly insightful uncommon wisdom and sometimes it was eye-roll worthy nonsense.
So by the time my oldest was eight years old, "Grandma would say" was basically polite code for "That might be crazy talk."
When he was eight, he asked me "What does it mean when you dream something and it comes true?" and I told him "I don't know. Some people would say X, some people would say Y. Grandma would say Z. Why don't you do some reading and decide for yourself what you think it means."
That's all I said about it. I didn't mention that I had MOUNTAINS of ugly baggage from growing up with my mother trying desperately to prove that she had dreams that came true and she could predict the future. Years later, he told me he could tell I was stressed out by the question but he didn't know why.
My mother was so much like the Trelawny character in Harry Potter, I suspect JK Rowling probably knew someone like my mother. Trelawny is supposed to be teaching divination and predicting the future and she's absolutely terrible at it, but sometimes blurts things out that correctly predict the future.
My mother's efforts to somehow prove she really could predict the future made her look like a crackpot because things she predicted never came true. Nonetheless, she sometimes said something that was like a psychic Freudian slip where she seemed to know things she couldn't know.
I came to believe that my mother really was psychic but that there was something about how it worked that made it fundamentally challenging to interact with it in a reliable, constructive fashion.
So dreaming the future ran in the family but the relative best known for claiming to do so was basically a nut job and her mental models for relating to it left me scared of the phenomenon and emotionally scarred with scary ideas like "If you dream it, it WILL happen and there's NOTHING you can do to stop it!"
When my oldest was sixteen -- twice as old as when he asked me about dreams that came true -- I mentioned something to him about a discussion happening on an email list I was on. Having not discussed it with him since, he said "Oh, no, that's not how that works." And schooled me on how dreams that predict the future are the brain crunching data and spitting it back in an information-dense visual format, similar to weather prediction.
I think this is probably true in most cases because dream predictions typically are metaphorical. It's relatively rare for someone to see the future as if watching a film of events that haven't happened yet.
I have come to think that some dreams of the future are "psychic" phenomenon but most are not. It's just a brain thinking in pictures, something some people do by default -- like Temple Grandin and my oldest son -- and some only do occasionally and then experience that as weird and call it "visions" or "dreams of the future."
He and I have talked a fair amount about things like psychic phenomenon in fiction being a metaphor for smart people seeming to know things magically when there's no magic. They are educated and well read and know a lot.
He does a lot of seemingly freakish stuff and can often tell you the logical, sciency explanation for it. Like how he picked the right date to end up with the very last Wii in stock without it requiring magic.
He wanted to skip the crowds and figured the first two days would be a madhouse. So he wanted to go on day three in hopes the initial rush was over but they wouldn't yet be sold out and his bet paid off.
My mother similarly sometimes did stuff that seemed woo but had a completely logical explanation. I once told her she always seemed to know when I most needed money and a check would show up like magic.
Her explanation: "I look at a calendar and if there's five weekends instead of four in the month, I send you money."
It had nothing to do with her being psychic. She knew my husband was on salary and got paid the same amount every month and some months are longer than others.
So all of this ultimately led to an extremely interesting conversation once on Tagmax about how gifted kids do stuff sometimes that makes you go "woo" where we talked about both 1. phenomenon no one could readily explain away that was probably psychic and 2. phenomenon that you could explain even if it initially seemed psychic.
It was an extremely meaty conversation because both people who believed in psychic phenomenon and people who didn't equally debated it in good faith. There was no confirmation bias skewing it in one direction or the other.
This led to a spin'off list of maybe two dozen people that ended up being complete garbage because none of the skeptics joined. Only people who WANTED TO BELIEVE joined, which made it my mother or Trelawny times 24 all enthusiastically agreeing it's obviously psychic and not looking for any other explanation.
I soon quit. I don't need this garbage messing with my head.