12 Facts About Indigo children

Indigo children, according to a pseudoscientific New Age concept, are children who are believed to possess special, unusual, and sometimes supernatural traits or abilities.

The concept of indigo children gained popular interest with the publication of a series of books in the late 1990s and the release of several films in the following decade.

Some parents choose to label their children who have been diagnosed with learning disabilities as an indigo child to alternatively diagnose them.

Some lists of traits used to describe indigo children have been criticized for being vague enough to be applied to most people, a form of the Forer effect.

Tappe stated that during the late 1960s and early 1970s she began noticing that many children were being born with indigo auras.

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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.

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 hyperactivity disorder.

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.

Many children labeled indigo by their parents are diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and Tober and Carroll's book The Indigo Children linked the concept with diagnosis of ADHD.

Many children labeled as indigo children have the same identifying criteria as those children who have experienced being raised by a narcissistic parent, and are considered to have been emotionally abused.

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.

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.