Indigo children and auras of color, another New Age hoax

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 to which it is associated; also because of the frictions that can arise between an inexperienced, relatively impulsive person and unaware of many social customs and the adults with whom he lives and who lend him protection, education and affection.

The widespread fraud of pseudosciences

To the complications that appear 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 misinterpreting minors. This margin for misinterpretation may be relevant enough to include wrong judgments about the intentions or interests of the children, or it may be broad enough to affect the perception of the child's own nature.

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

What are Indigo Children?

The idea of indigo children was born during the 1980s with a New Age book called Understanding Your Life Through Colorby Nancy Tappe. In it, the author said she was able to see an invisible aura that surrounds people and informs about the nature of each one. 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 future of the story.

These young people with a blue 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 generating content on the subject, and ambiguous enough to take advantage of good dose of Forer effect before part of the public opinion. The only more or less concrete thing that can be known about indigo children is that they need a treatment and education different from the The rest of the children are more sensitive to the "spiritual plane" of reality and bring a message of peace from mysterious and immaterial. Each of these children is something like an outpost of a new world full of peace and love to come, the first signs of a paradigm shift, etc.

Because of the pseudoscientific 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, when resorting to spiritual elements to be explained, cannot be put to the test.

Why is it dangerous to believe all this?

Listening to these types of ideas can be very harmful if it helps to mask the problems or challenges that the child faces. For example, a variant of the indigo children called "crystal children" can be related to cases of autism or the controversial ADHD, or it acts as a label applied to young people who simply show some unusual aspects or behaviors and who 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.

In addition, how texts about Indigo children can refer to the special needs of these people and their capacities "Superiors" something similar to a caste system or a new form of racism is generated based, this time, on a color that is not seen: that of the aura. On the other hand, the messianic message associated with the indigo children displaces very concrete and material problems, displacing them to a spiritual world, thereby creating a teleology hardly justifiable.

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 for what it really is: a series of fictional stories about reality developed with more or less skill and with more or less complexity. However, given the large volume of pseudoscientific content that New writers bombard us year after year. Age, it would be interesting to consider if we would not win by changing these texts for those of Tolkien, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

After all, worldly beings and linked to materiality have to render accounts before the god of time well spent.