Indigo children

The term "indigo children" originated with parapsychologist and self-described synesthete and psychic Nancy Ann Tappe, who developed the concept in the 1970s.[7] In 1982 Tappe published a comb-bound[8][9][10] which she expanded and republished in paperback in 1986 as Understanding Your Life Thru Color.[8][11][12] In these works Tappe introduced the concept of "life colors",[8][13][14] defined in Understanding Your Life Thru Color as "the single color of the aura that remains constant in most people from the cradle to the grave".[15][16] The concept of "life colors" was popularized nationally by Tappe's student Barbara Bowers,[17][18] who published What Color Is Your Aura?: Personality Spectrums for Understanding and Growth in 1989,[19][20][21] and by Bowers' student Pamala Oslie,[22][18] who published Life Colors: What the Colors in Your Aura Reveal in 1991.[23][24]

Tappe stated that during the late 1960s and early 1970s she began noticing that many children were being born with indigo auras (or, in her terminology, with indigo as their "life color").[9][7][25] The idea was later popularized by the 1998 book The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived, written by husband and wife self-help lecturers Lee Carroll and Jan Tober.[26][27]

In 2002, the first international conference on indigo children was held in Hawaii, drawing 600 attendees, and there have been subsequent conferences in Florida, Oregon, and elsewhere.[28] Several films have been produced on the subject, including two films by New Age writer James Twyman: a 2003 feature film Indigo and a 2006 documentary The Indigo Evolution.[28]

Sarah W. Whedon suggests in a 2009 article in Nova Religio that the social construction of indigo children is a response to an "apparent crisis of American childhood" in the form of increased youth violence and diagnoses of attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Whedon believes parents label their children as "indigo" to provide an alternative explanation for their children's improper behavior stemming from ADD and ADHD.[9]

Descriptions of indigo children include that they:

• Are empathic, curious, and strong-willed
• Are often perceived by friends and family as being strange
• Possess a clear sense of self-definition and purpose
• Show a strong innate subconscious spirituality from early childhood (which, however, does not necessarily imply a direct interest in spiritual or religious areas)
• Have a strong feeling of entitlement, or deserving to be here

Other alleged traits include:[7][26]

• High intelligence quotient
• Inherent intuitive ability
• Resistance to rigid, control-based paradigms of authority

According to Tober and Carroll, indigo children may function poorly in conventional schools due to their rejection of rigid authority, their being smarter or more spiritually mature than their teachers, and their lack of response to guilt-, fear- or manipulation-based discipline.[28]

According to research psychologist Russell Barkley, the New Age movement has yet to produce empirical evidence of the existence of indigo children, as the traits most commonly attributed to them are closely aligned with the Forer effect—so vague that they could describe nearly anyone. Many critics see the concept of indigo children as made up of extremely general traits, a sham diagnosis that is an alternative to a medical diagnosis, with a complete lack of science or studies to support it.[7][29]

The concept of indigo children has been criticized for being less about children and their needs, and more about the profits to be made by self-styled experts in book and video sales as well as lucrative counseling sessions, summer camps, conferences and speaking engagements.[28][33]

Nancy Ann Tappe originally noted that one type of Indigo child (the "interdimensional child"), despite being seen as a bully, was expected to lead new religious movements.[3]

One pagan author, Lorna Tedder, anecdotally notes that every pagan woman she knew who had or was going to have a child believed their child was an Indigo child.[34]

S. Zohreh Kermani states that "Despite their problems with authority, uncontrollable tempers, and overbearing egos, Indigo Children are many pagan parents' ideal offspring: sensitive, psychic, and strong willed", but also notes the concept is less about the child's psychic abilities than the parent's own hopes and desire for "distinction from the less-evolved masses."[34]

Daniel Kline, in an essay titled "The New Kids: Indigo Children and New Age Discourse", notes that the magical belief that the innocence of children equates to spiritual powers has existed for centuries, and that the indigo child movement is rooted in a religious rejection of science-based medicine. In particular, he claims that Nancy Ann Tappe derived some of her ideas from Charles Webster Leadbeater (her main innovation being emphasizing the connection between children and the color indigo), and that the New Age adoption of the concept is a reaction against diagnoses of ADD, ADHD, and autism. Kline also discusses how Carroll and Tober have tried to distance themselves from religious beliefs about indigo children in order to maintain control of the concept (even recanting their previous affirmations about auras), and how skeptics and New Agers alike both make rhetorical appeals to science (despite the latter's rejection of it) to legitimize their ideological beliefs regarding the existence of indigo children.[35]

At the 2014 University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas, anthropologist Beth Singler discussed how the term indigo children functioned as a new religious movement, along with Jediism.[36][37] Singler's work focuses in the Indigo movement as a part of an overall discussion on "wider moral panics around children, parenting, the diagnosis of conditions such as ADHD and autism and conspiracy theories about Big Pharma and vaccinations."[38]