About the book
Children’s Past Lives: How Past Life Memories Affect Your Child was published by Bantam in 1997, with a British edition from Element the same year under a slightly different subtitle. Its author, Carol Bowman, was an American past-life regression therapist living near Philadelphia; the copyright is shared with her husband, Steve Bowman, who helped edit it.1
It is a book for parents, not a research report. It combines Bowman’s family story, accounts sent in by parents and advice on how to respond, and its claims rest mainly on what parents told her and on her own judgment.1
How it began
Bowman writes that the book grew out of an afternoon in 1988 in Asheville, North Carolina. Her five-year-old son Chase had become terrified of loud booms, first at a Fourth of July fireworks display and then at an indoor pool. A house guest, the hypnotherapist Norman Inge, asked Chase at the kitchen table to close his eyes and say what he saw when he heard the noises. With no formal induction, Chase described himself as an adult soldier crouched behind a rock, shot in the right wrist and later sent to fire a cannon.1
His sister Sarah, then nine, pointed out that the wound matched the spot where Chase had had stubborn eczema since infancy. Bowman reports that the rash and the fear of noise both cleared within days. Sarah then described dying as a girl in a house fire, believing her parents had abandoned her, and soon unpacked the bag of dolls she had kept under her bed for escape. Later recollections, one of them prompted by news of the 1991 Gulf War, led Bowman to conclude that Chase had been a Black soldier in the American Civil War.1
These sessions, and her own regression with Inge a year earlier, led her to train in regression therapy and look for other children with such memories.1
Contents
The book has sixteen chapters in three parts. Part One, ‘Past Life Stories’, follows her search: her children’s regressions, past-life therapists’ focus on the moment of death, her early regressions of Chase and his friends, a chapter on Ian Stevenson, a conference of the Association for Past-Life Research and Therapies, the case of Blake, and her family’s 1994 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Part Two is a practical guide covering the ‘four signs’, triggers, what parents can do, and nightmares. Part Three, ‘Listen to the Children’, looks at reincarnation in Christianity and Judaism, children said to return to the same family, and how adults might see children differently.1
The cases
Most of the cases came from parents who answered a classified advertisement Bowman placed in Mothering magazine, or from friends. The best known is Blake, a three-year-old from the Midwest who said a man had hit him with a big truck and that he had died. Over the following months he became withdrawn, complained of pains on his left side, and on a London street jumped from his stroller toward a truck. On Bowman’s advice his mother told him at bedtime that the accident had happened in another life, with a different body and a different mother. Bowman reports that his mood and pains cleared almost overnight.1
Other accounts include Liia, who at two said, as the car crossed a bridge, that she had died when her car fell into water, and who had always insisted on seat belts. On the Oprah show a Civil War historian, while skeptical about past lives, said Chase’s account was consistent with the period; but a psychiatrist’s regression aimed at names produced one, Henry Johnson, that the children later said they might have invented under pressure. None of these cases was investigated as Stevenson’s were.1
Advice to parents
Bowman’s ‘four signs’ of a past-life memory are a matter-of-fact tone, consistency over time, knowledge beyond the child’s experience, and corresponding behaviour or traits. She presents them as a way for parents to reassure themselves, not as proof, and warns against confusing them with Stevenson’s methods. She says almost anything can act as a trigger: an object, a place, a taste, a photograph, a television image or a real gunshot.1
Her chapter ‘What a Parent Can Do’ sets out five steps: stay calm, acknowledge the memory, listen to discern its facts and feelings, allow emotions, and make clear the difference between past and present. She urges open-ended questions, letting the child lead, and never scolding or arguing with the child.1
Stevenson, death and rebirth
Bowman gives a popular summary of Stevenson’s work, with cases such as Parmod and Sukla from India and Michael Wright from Texas, and patterns such as memories beginning between two and five and phobias linked to the manner of death. She finds his style dry and regrets his lack of interest in healing. She notes that he stopped short of claiming proof, but says she will not be so cautious, and argues that his work frees parents to accept weaker cases without verification, a step researchers would not take.1
She treats death as a passage rather than an end, holding that feelings left unresolved at death carry into the next life and that children’s memories are a natural chance to heal them. The chapter ‘Death Is a Revolving Door’ retells the Pollock twins case from Stevenson and a grandmother’s belief that her son returned as her grandson. Her sequel, Return from Heaven (2001), took up such family-return cases, and she later advised the parents of James Leininger.12