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<i>Are They Here to Save the World?</i>
By JOHN LELAND, January 12, 2006

AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa 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 Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. 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," Ms. 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.

Continued over at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/fashion/thursdaystyles/12INDIGO.html/partner/rssnyt/" target="new">The New York Times</a> [login may be required]