Smart kids saviors of the world?
January 22, 2006 
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What do you all think of this? I’m still trying to figure out what I think of it. It is definitely an interesting article. I hadn’t ever thought about the idea that exceptionally smart children were “leaps” in human evolution or were “here” to serve as a beacon to save us from ourselves.
‘Indigo children’ saviors of world?
Some parents believe their unusually bright children are leaps in human evolution
By JOHN LELAND
NEW YORK TIMESAt a coffee shop in New York one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.
“Tell him I’m strong,” he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.
“I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn’t raining,” he said.
“I’m getting bored,” he said.
At David’s public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her, David’s traits – his intelligence, empathy and impatience – make him an “indigo” child.
“He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn’t know where to fit him,” she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. “Our consciousness is changing, it’s expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way,” Badillo said. “We were much more connected with the creator before, and we’re trying to get back to that connection.”
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent “perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented,” Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in “The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived” (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, “Indigo Evolution,” is scheduled to open on about 200 screens – at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places – on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970s by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
In “The Indigo Children,” Carroll and Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high IQ, acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as ADD, or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.
Offered as a guide for “the parents of unusually bright and active children,” the book includes common criticisms of today’s child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
“To me, these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace,” said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children.
She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. “They’re vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity,” Virtue said. “Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won’t, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin.”
To skeptics, the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. “All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case, it’s a sham diagnosis,” said Dr. Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “There’s no science behind it. There are no studies.”
Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called “Barnum statements,” after P.T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they “could describe most of the people most of the time,” which means that they don’t describe anything.
Parents who attribute their children’s inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in New York who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.
“I’m very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors,” she said. “I’m not against medication at all. I just think it’s overused.”
When parents take children to her for treatment – she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person’s electromagnetic field – she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.
“Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, ‘I’m talking to an angel,’ or ‘I’m talking to someone who’s deceased’?” Tuchman asked. “A lot of them have no one to talk to.” She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.
Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.
“The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change,” Marjorie Jackson said.
“The kids may seem like they have ADD or ADHD. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won’t be disruptive.”
She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in “fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode.”
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