Useful Facts
The average age for a child who remembers a past life to start talking about it is around three, though in some cases a child’s very first words relate to a past life.
Most often, children forget past lives between the ages of five and eight, and past-life-related behaviours tend to fade at the same time, but some retain both memories and behaviours into adulthood.
Children who remember past lives tend to be bright and early to speak.
Children most often remember their most recent past life, but can sometimes remember a life further back in time, and sometimes more than one life.
Children who remember past lives often behave in ways related to their past lives, e.g., play that re-enacts their previous occupation, creating art with past-life scenes, pursuing interests more typical of adults, yearning to be with past-life families or associates, displaying knowledge or showing skills they did not learn in this life, having a phobia that would result from a specific trauma despite not having one, and, more rarely, speaking or understanding a foreign language.
Children with past-life memories can be born into any family, anywhere in the world, in any culture or religion, reincarnationist or not.
It is common for children who remember past lives to recall violent or abrupt deaths, which can be a source of distress.
Past-life memories can cause identity crises in children who remember them very well. Here it is important for parents to explain that the sense of identity from the past life does come from the past, a different time in the child’s existence–in other words, that they don’t have two identities simultaneously, but have had two social identities in different times–and it’s part of the wonder of who they are.