Ask an Amateur Scientist: 
Indigo Children

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

Back in 2006, comic actress and former professional nude person Jenny McCarthy started a website called IndigoMoms.com.  It was meant to be a gathering place for mothers of so-called “indigo children”, where they could talk amongst themselves and help each other cope with the day-to-day problems and pleasures of rearing the next stage of human evolution.  Also, they could buy crystal healing necklaces.  Everybody gotta make a little scratch, you know.

Jenny claimed that her son was an indigo child, and that she herself was an adult indigo.  Her son, she said, was special.  Unusually sensitive to the elements and keenly focused on the minutia of life.  He was a crystal being.  He was amazing.

Later, Jenny dropped IndigoMoms.com.  There’s nothing at the site now, but you can see an archived version of it here.  And since she’s cut herself off from the indigo community, she’s also changed her tune about just what was so special about her son.  Turns out, he wasn’t so much an indigo as autistic.  Not only that, but she knew what caused his autism: deadly vaccines!

I’ve already covered the problems with anti-vaccinationism due to autism fears in this column before.  Though that hasn’t stopped the ignorance from taking hold, leading to a rise in child-killing diseases that were all but eradicated.

Jenny now says her son has been cured of his autism through a gluten-free diet.  A gluten-free diet as some kind of magic cure-all, like the imaginary autism/vaccine link, is based on no scientific evidence whatsoever.  In other words, it’s bunk.  But should anyone be surprised?  This all started with Jenny thinking she and her son were indigo people.  And as it turns out, that’s a load of bunk as well.

II. The Findings

Hop in your cardboard box and scribble “Time Machine” on the side with your crayons, folks, because we’re going back to 1982.  It was an extraordinary time.  Reagan had yet to forget ever hearing the words “Iran” or “Contra”.  Joan Rivers still had most of her original face.  And the Rolling Stones had just embarked on their road to irrelevancy.  It was the best of times, it was the most cocaine fueled of times.  In short, it was the best of times.

It was also the year self-proclaimed psychic Nancy Anne Tappe published her book Understanding Your Life Through Color.  No, this wasn’t a pitch for Avon products.  (I’m a summer.)  Instead, it was an educational tome about the meanings of auras, mysterious energy fields Tappe claimed to be able to see around all people.  Once again, your B.S. detector should be lighting up like Egon’s P.K.E. meter at the word “energy”.  Like every other New Age usage of the term, it doesn’t mean anything here.

Basically, Tappe claimed that the color of a person’s aura reflects that person’s inner self.  Everything from mood to “potential” could possibly be determined by studying a person’s aura.  Tappe didn’t provide any evidence that she could see auras or what auras are made of or if they even exist, but that’s beside the point.

Oh, wait.  That’s actually the whole point.  This woman was just pulling stuff out of her ass.  Not to belabor a point, but even saying that auras have different colors makes no logical sense.  As any elementary school science student can tell you, color is caused by the reflection of light off of matter.  If that matter absorbs all light in the spectrum save for green, it reflects green light back at your eyes, thus appearing green to you.  In order for an aura to have a color, it has to reflect light.  Which means it has to be matter.  Which means it isn’t energy.  Which mean Nancy Anne Tappe was full it.

Regardless, she claimed to have noticed in the ’60s that certain children were giving off a strange indigo aura.  These children, she argued, demonstrated unique tendencies that “normal” children don’t.  This has been the basis for all belief in indigo children.  After Tappe’s book was published, the subject bounced around from crank to crackpot.  There have since been several books, TV shows, and even a movie or two on indigo children.

But for a belief that’s so popular and tenacious, it doesn’t have any sort of cohesive definition.  Everyone who talks about indigo children describes them as special in some way, but those ways change all the time.  If you read all the literature on the subject, you’d find that empathy, curiosity, self-determination, willfulness, independence, weirdness, arrogance, social awkwardness, excessive concentration, excessive distraction, high intelligence, great test scores, and terrible test scores are all traits of an indigo child.  In short, you’re an indigo child.  Congratulations.

So far, this has just been a bunch of harmless nonsense.  It really gets wacky when indigo believers try to explain why these children are the way they are.  Instead of chalking up these traits to ADHD, restlessness, autism, or just being a normal kid, they claim that indigo children are the next stage of human evolution.  This is a recurring bit of nonsense both in New Age beliefs and in fundamentalist Christianity, oddly.  Plenty of crazy Christians believe that we’re in the End Times and that Armageddon is just around the corner.  This is why they’re so anxious to sell you sub-literate sci-fi series based on the Rapture.  Similarly, New Age believers have been going on for years about how we’re in the final days of a kind of dark ages, and that the “Age of Aquarius” will see a new advancement in human enlightenment.

Not every indigo enthusiast shares this belief.  Some of them just think these kids are particularly special and deserve their own classification.  But many others believe indigo children are harbingers of the future, even going so far as to claim they have psychic powers and other abilities that would make them excellent X-Men.  Or at least, members of Generation X.

This becomes dangerous when parents don’t seek necessary medical and psychological attention for their children because they think they’re the next stage of evolution.  Any parent of a child with autism or ADHD can tell you that taking care of these kids is a chore.  They shouldn’t be looked down upon, but they shouldn’t be placed on some kind of imaginary pedestal either.  They have medical problems that can be treated in the vast majority of cases with evidence-based medicine.  They don’t need their moms and dads to knit them a tinfoil jumpsuit and clear a space in the back yard for the motherships to land.

III. The Conclusion

The belief in indigo children is one of those tricky bits of nonsense that’s impossible to completely disprove.  The best you can say is that there’s no evidence to support it at all.  But that’s enough to make any parent think twice about jumping to some insane conclusion about their child.  No one wants to think his or her kid is average, but everyone should resist the urge to overcompensate by pretending his or her child is something it isn’t.

In the words of Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  If I told you I ran into an old college buddy at the grocery store, I don’t have to back that up with a lot of facts.  It’s well within the realm of established reality.  (Well, if you can believe I had college buddies and didn’t spend all my time cooped up in a dorm room watching Sailor Moon DVDs.  WHICH I DIDN’T DO!!)  But if I said I went to the grocery store and ran into a herd of Wampas from the ice planet Hoth, you’d probably want me to back that up with at least a grainy cell phone picture.  And you’d be a fool not to!

So until Jenny McCarthy can prove that her son has the powers of the crystal people or an indigo aura or autism caused by routine and life-saving vaccinations?  I’m not buying it.  I’m sure he’s a really wonderful kid who’s going to grow up just fine.  Too bad that’s not good enough for his mom.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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