Indigo children and colored auras, another New Age hoax

Dismantling one of the most widespread pseudoscientific theories.

Have you heard about the Indigo Children? It's no secret that childhood is a difficult time..

Not only because of the succession of rapid changes it is associated with, but also because of the frictions that can arise between an inexperienced, relatively impulsive person, unaware of many social customs, and the adults with whom he or she lives and who provide protection, education and affection.

The generalized fraud of 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 sufficiently relevant to include misjudgments about the intentions or interests of children, or it can be broad enough to affect the way of perceiving the child's own nature.

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

What are Indigo children?

The idea of the indigo children was born during the 80's with a book of the New Age current called Understanding Your Life Through Colorby Nancy Tappe. In it, the author claimed to be able to see an invisible aura that surrounds people and informs about their nature. Thanks to this gift, Tappe would have been able to discover a rapid growth in the number of people born with a bluish aura, indicating something like a qualitative change in the course of history.

These young people with a bluish aura are the indigo children, people endowed with a privileged relationship with the spiritual and with certain special properties.

Forer effect to deceive the uninformed

The description of the indigo child typology is broad enough for several New Age gurus to profit by generating content on the subject, and ambiguous enough to take advantage of a good dose of the Forer Effect with part of the public opinion. The only more or less concrete thing that can be known about indigo children is that they need a different treatment and education than other children, they 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 change of paradigms, etc.

Because of the pseudoscientific basis of the "Indigo Children" concept, it can hardly be said to be a theory or a hypothesis. It is, in any case, another piece in the museum of speculation. speculations which, by resorting to spiritual elements to be explained, cannot be put to the test.

Why is it dangerous to believe all this?

Listening to this type of ideas can be very harmful if it contributes to mask the problems or challenges faced by the child. For example, a variant of indigo children called "crystal children may be associated with cases of autism or the much-discussed ADHD, or it may function as a label applied to youngsters who simply exhibit 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 it allows us to deny a neurological or psychological diagnosis that causes us rejection.

Moreover, as texts about indigo children may refer to the special needs of these people and their "superior" abilities, something akin to a caste system or a new form of racism is generated based, this time, on an unseen color: that of the aura. On the other hand, the messianic message associated with indigo children displaces very concrete and material problems to a spiritual world, thus creating a hardly justifiable teleology.

Finally, it should be noted that when reading about the existence of indigo children, one is 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 fictitious stories about reality developed with more or less skill 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 by exchanging these texts for those of Tolkien, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

At the end of the day, we mundane and materially bound beings are accountable to the god of time well spent..