Religious conversion is rarer the older the person. Establishing fabricated expectations early is important?
What specific factors in popular religions would you say contribute to early conversions, that are not as effective later?
In general it's going to have something to do with the variety of influences(wider in later life), the amount of information available about the world, and the desire/ability to think about it. But what specific mechanisms in which religions take advantage of this?
Is it that as the individual is developing an understanding of the world, religious expectations are established at the core? Like an afterlife, ultimate justice system, a code for human interaction that does not benefit from further consideration, and an overseeing super-being. Once lifted up into that fog it becomes hard to find one's way back down to reality without encountering a feeling of deprivation and depression. A dependency is created that the religion can then also fulfill.
Or is it more so teaching the individual to misattribute non-supernatural phenomena(the good, life, Earth, the universe in general, etc) to the god character. To where a lack of the god character would mean a lack of anything good or meaningful to them. Leaving them one god character away from nihilism. Does that happen right away, or is it more of a petrifying factor that comes into effect later, after years of misattributing those phenomena to the god character?