The parents meant well, but keeping this secret to ‘protect their son’ actually caused more harm than good.
The son, Noah, was obsessed with death. Beginning at age 8 he studied the obituaries, asking all sorts of interesting questions about the people who died. He was very concerned about his parents death and the death of a fantasied brother.
His parents did not help him address this, but kept dismissing his interest as some quirk that he would outgrow.
As it turns out, a really good psychotherapy treatment helped him come to terms with the fact that he actually had an older brother who had died at the age of 8 months and that his ‘quirk’ was not merely a quirk but a good intuitive guess. This intuition was transmitted from his parents to him unwittingly and in spite of their conscious decision to ‘not burden him’ with this information.
The psyche is very interesting!