I received an article today talking about the “backlash” against the idea of Indigo children, and yesterday I received an irate e-mail from someone accusing me of exploiting children to make money!

Oh dear!

So…just what exactly is going on here…and what are Indigo children?

I would like to say that when I began my work with Indigo children, between 1998 and 2001, there were a lot of unhappy parents and children that needed help to understand what was happening. That was the motivation for my work that became the e-book “The Indigo Crystal Adventure”.

However, in 2006 there are still a lot of unhappy children and parents, and a growing rejection of the idea of the New Children. Which is unfortunate. It’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and really helps no one.

So what happened?

Well, I think Hollywood happened. A lot of media glamorization that can be tracked back to James Twyman and Neale Donald Walsch. Now while I understand their desire to make the idea of Indigo children more widely known, what was unfortunate was the glamorization of Indigo and Crystal children as “Psychic kids”. The whole presentation is that these kids are “special” and different.

Most of the letters I get from Indigo teens is to tell me how special and different they are.

Now, in my own work I have never taken this route. For me, the purpose of being Indigo or Crystal is not to be Psychic and “special”. Indigos and Crystals have a specific spiritual work to undertake, and it is not particularly involved with being psychic.

Indigo children came to show us that we needed to change. Their unhappiness and their anger was the wake-up call to humanity that we were doing something very wrong with our children. The Crystal children came to show us how to connect with our Hearts and to remember how to love and how to empower ourselves. And if they have psychic ability it is because all humans have psychic ability which is innate, but is suppressed in most people through fear.

So, the New Children. whatever you call them, are here to do serious spiritual work, and not to glamorize being “psychic”.

I remember writing a long piece on the Starchild Forum, now defunct, about the dangers of this glamorization approach. I objected to the glamorization of a ten year old artist whose gifts were being put forward as an example of an advanced Indigo consciousness. As far as I could see, there have always been artistic prodigies over the ages. Mozart for example. And they are usually exploited and burnt out before they are thirty.

For me, the essence of childhood is innocence and fun and choices. Your teen years are the time you spend deciding what you will do and what you would like to explore. If, by the time you are ten, you are already in an established “career”, it seems more likely that you are just playing out the repressed desires and fantasies of your parents. A ten year old has no real idea about who and what they are or would like to be. That is the adventure of life. Finding out and discovering what it is that you will become in this lifetime.

Prodigy children who land here knowing art or music or science are probably just drawing heavily on past life gifts and living out past life obsessions, and are not allowing themselves to develop in a balanced way into this new life. They don’t have time to be children. To laugh and play and have a good time with their friends. They don’t have time for friends.

And, as far as I can see, the whole purpose of the evolutionary shift we are experiencing is to open our hearts to each other and to learn to be with each other in loving ways. This was the message in the article I wrote last year about the “Message of the New Children”. So turning a child into a genius/prodigy is actually going against the flow of evolution as I see it. It is denying the child the space to grow into a loving and caring human, and focussing on what the child “does” and the expense of who he or she “is”.

Please - let your child be a child, no matter how bright and precocious they may be right now. And most New Children are really intelligent. And manipulative and smart. Its evolution. Don’t push them and don’t expect them to live out your dreams and desires. They will if they think that will win them your approval and love. Let them take the time to find out who they are when they are mature enough and ready enough. And in their own time and way.

Another equally disturbing trend is the glamorization of the “spacy” and “ungrounded” child. I have recently read an article by an American where the “disconnected” child is defined as a “multi-dimensional” child, and this is seen as something special and wonderful.

Well ….a spaced out and disconnected child is an unhappy and miserable child, and the best thing you can do for that child is to help to get it grounded, and fast. When I worked intensively with children in 2002 and 2003, I encountered many spaced out and unhappy children, and the problem was usually trauma in the family and the pressure of the parents. Sure they were gifted and talented, they were also spaced out and unhappy.

The need of these children is to feel safe enough to be fully grounded and here, to connect with other people and other children, and to fully enjoy life. Not to float around being spaced out and disconnected. The result will be a spaced out teen who will probably take drugs and become a dysfunctional adult.

So, as far as I can see it, there is a lot of work to be done with our communities and in educating parents, caregivers and ordinary people about the problems children face today. That has always been the focus of my work. And this applies to ALL children, for the Indigo and Crystal vibrations are carried by all children to some degree, its part of an evolutionary shift for the entire species and not just some specially selected few.

So, lets get real here. There is lots of valuable work that has been done on Indigo children by Kryon and Lee Carroll, by Doreen Virtue, by Sandra Sedgebeer and Dan Jacobs and the people at “Children of the New Earth”, in helping us to really understand this new phenomenon. And, at the end of the day, I guess what Twyman and Walsch were trying to do was to help us all to understand that there is something special going on with our children that we need to wake up to.

So, what I think this new trend indicates is that we are going through a change in our understanding of what Indigo children are and what they do. And no, its not about labels and how special an individual is. It’s about a global shift in humanity that I call “conscious evolution”. It would be a pity if this were lost because of the media hype and glamorization.

I don’t think that will happen. The energy of the New Children - Indigo and Crystal - is far too strong and powerful.

So, I would like to say that the glomorization of Indigo children needs to be replaced by a careful understanding of what these children need from us and how we can help them. Indigo children are not just affluent American products, they are born in Africa and Asia too, but they don’t have the same opportunities there. Maybe part of the way forward is to begin to understand how we, as a planetary people can start to help our children to be here and to live their lives to their full potential.

Let’s stop glamorizing being “special” and “different” and start seeing what these children are really saying. The message of the Heart is Empowerment for All. Let’s start working to empower our children, they are the future. And we empower them through love and unconditional acceptance of ALL children.