Have you heard of the Indigo Children ? It is no secret that childhood is a difficult time l. Not only because of the succession of rapid changes with which it is associated; also because of the frictions that can arise between an inexperienced, relatively impulsive person who is unfamiliar with many social customs and the adults with whom he lives and who provide him with protection, education and affection.

Widespread fraud in pseudosciences

To the complications that arise in the relationship between children and adults we must add the difficulty with which young people express what they feel and identify their own thought patterns, and the result of this is that many people are prone to misinterpret minors. This scope for misinterpretation may be relevant enough to include misguided judgements about children’s intentions or interests, or it may be broad enough to affect the way in which the child’s own nature is perceived.

It is in this second case that the pseudoscience of New Age dyes has fertile ground to make ideas as dangerous as that of the Indigo Children prosper .

What are indigo children?

The idea of indigo children was born during the 1980s with a New Age book called Understanding Your Life Through Color , by Nancy Tappe. In it, the author claimed to be able to see an invisible aura that surrounds people and informs them of their nature. Thanks to this gift, Tappe would have been able to discover a rapid growth in the number of people born with a blue aura, indicating something like a qualitative change in the course of history. These young people with a blue aura are indigo children, people with a privileged relationship with the spiritual and with certain special properties.

Forer effect to fool the uninformed

The description of the typology of the indigo child is broad enough for several New Age gurus to profit from generating content on the subject, and ambiguous enough to take advantage of a good dose of Forer Effect before public opinion. The only thing more or less concrete that can be known about indigo children is that they need a treatment and education different from other children, are more sensitive to the “spiritual plane” of reality and bring a message of peace from mysterious and immaterial instances. Each of these children is something like an advance guard of a new world full of peace and love that is to come, the first signs of a paradigm shift, and so on.

Because of the pseudo-scientific basis of the concept “Indigo Children”, it can hardly be said that it is a theory or a hypothesis. It is, in any case, another piece of the museum of the speculations that, by resorting to spiritual elements to be explained, cannot be put to the test.

Why is it dangerous to believe all this?

Listening to such ideas can be very harmful if it helps to mask the problems or challenges faced by the child. For example, a variant of indigo children called “crystal children” can be related to cases of autism or the much discussed ADHD, or it acts as a label applied to young people who simply show some unusual aspects or behaviors and therefore find it difficult to adapt to some environments. For example, it is tempting to start believing in the special properties of a child if that allows us to deny a neurological or psychological diagnosis that causes us rejection.

Moreover, since texts about indigo children may refer to the special needs of these people and their “superior” abilities, something similar to a caste system or a new form of racism is generated, this time based on a colour that is not seen: that of the aura. On the other hand, the messianic message associated with indigo children displaces very concrete and material problems by displacing them to a spiritual world, thus creating a teleology that is difficult to justify.

Finally, it should be noted that when you are reading about the existence of indigo children, you are reading something that belongs to the genre of fantasy. It can be entertaining if it is digested as what it really is: a series of fictional stories about reality developed with more or less tact and with more or less complexity. However, given the large volume of pseudo-scientific content with which New Age writers bombard us year after year, it would be interesting to consider whether we would not gain from changing these texts for those of Tolkien, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

In the end, worldly and materialistic beings are accountable to the god of time well spent .