Do Children Choose Their Parents?

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Deb Wise was taking her 4-year-old daughter Katie into town so they could have lunch with Wise’s husband, Dennis. Katie asked if Uncle Tom, a good friend of theirs, would be there. Wise answered yes, and Katie leaned in close to whisper a secret.

“He saved my life once,” the girl said.

Wise was dumbfounded and felt goosebumps all over.

There was no way her daughter could have known that. When Wise found out she was pregnant with Katie, she considered, with a heavy heart, having an abortion.

As it happened, having Katie saved Wise’s life. And ever since she and Dennis were blessed with the happy baby girl, there were little signs here and there that Katie knew it, too. In fact, it appeared to Wise that Katie had planned for it.

But that comment about Uncle Tom clinched it—Wise knew then that Katie was her mother, Elizabeth, who returned.

Children’s Past Lives

Wise sought counsel from Carol Bowman, who, with permission from Wise, reprinted her story in the book “Return From Heaven.”

Bowman is a past-life therapist and reincarnation researcher with unique insight into children’s past lives. After her own encounter with past life therapy, she saw how her young children, ages 5 and 9 at the time, both healed phobias instantaneously and a physical ailment within days. The epiphany that perhaps “the soul wants to heal,” thus resulting in the manifestation of phobias and unexplainable medical conditions, prompted her to engage in many conversations with parents in her community who turned out also to have heard their children spontaneously recalling past life memories.

Bowman’s research resulted in the book “Children’s Past Lives,” which served as a guide for American families at a loss when their young children, typically under age 6, began recalling past lives.

Over the past three decades, Bowman has collected hundreds of stories and discovered many recurring themes—one being reincarnation within the same family.

“As I got more deeply into the research, I was getting these cases of parents who were calling me saying, ’this might sound weird, but I think my father has been reborn as my daughter‘ or ’my mother who died in a car accident is back as my son,’” Bowman said in an interview with NTD.

This “family return” does not always happen, but it happens frequently enough that Bowman realized this phenomenon deserved research. She collected so many stories and they served as the basis of her book, “Return From Heaven,” which explores some reasons for the phenomenon and the effects these experiences have on the families.

Bowman initially thought that family return was the exception, not the rule, and a rare one at that. As she gathered more of the stories, she realized that reincarnation into the same family was logical.

Carol Bowman, a pioneer in the field of past life healing, is the author of "Children's Past Lives" and "Return From Heaven." ("Mysteries of Life"/NTD)

Katie and Elizabeth

Children talk about choosing their parents, though in the West, it’s not a phrase that brings to mind the idea of reincarnation.

Wise’s parents divorced when she was young, and afterward, her mother was never the same. It was devastating for her mother, who fell into a deep depression and drank heavily.

Elizabeth was abusive when she drank, both verbally and physically. Wise remembers locking her mother in her bedroom during these fits of temper and shielding her younger sister. For some time, Wise truly hated her, but she never told anyone what these moments at home were like.

When Wise was 18, her relationship with her mother began to improve. It ended suddenly when Elizabeth fell into a coma, passing away two weeks later. Wise’s healing was abruptly interrupted. She prayed for her mother and felt those prayers went unanswered.

Years later, Wise got married and had three children. Periodically, her husband would go on destructive drinking binges, and during these times, Wise had dreams of her childhood—happy memories of her mother when they were young. It was an abusive marriage. Wise was afraid to leave, even after she had fallen in love with Dennis.

Then Wise became pregnant with her fourth child, and the dreams stopped.

The child was Dennis’s and threw a wrench into the routine of Wise’s life. “We were in absolute turmoil,” Wise told Bowman. She contemplated an abortion.

The next day, Tom, Dennis’s work colleague, told him he hadn’t slept all night because he was kept up by the sound of a baby crying, and thought perhaps it was a sign that there was a baby in trouble. Dennis broke down in tears when he heard this and shared the whole story with Tom, who urged him to let the baby live.

That pregnancy pushed Wise to get a divorce. Friends and family completely shunned her and turned their backs on her when they found out she was pregnant. But Wise believed it was the right choice to keep the baby.

Katie started speaking early, and one of her first full sentences was, “Do you remember when I was your mommy?” Wise thought it was just something children said and paid no particular attention to it.

One day, Katie crawled into Wise’s lap and said, “They used to call me Blondie,” using a nickname Elizabeth had when she was younger, which Katie had never heard used. She talked about when she was Wise’s “mommy” again and then said, “But I didn’t like you very much when you were my little girl.”

It was both haunting and strange. “Why didn’t you? Mommies always love their little girls!“ Wise said. Katie responded, ”Because you always used to yell at me, push me into my room, and lock the door.” Wise was stunned. She had never told anyone about those incidents of locking her mother in her bedroom.

Evidence continued to pile up, with Katie sharing details from Elizabeth’s life and showing preferences for the same bizarre Depression-era foods, until Katie shared that Uncle Tom had saved her life, and Wise just knew.

“I feel sad for my mother—she had a miserable childhood, and because of her addictions, she never had a good relationship with any of us. What a wasted life. Now, I feel if Katie is my mom, she gets another kick at the cat. Maybe this is her second, third, or hundredth life to try to figure it out. I think that’s why she’s back. Hopefully, this time things will be better. No matter who this soul is, I love her,” Wise told Bowman.

“One thing I do know for sure: If Katie is my mom, she saved my life. By coming back when she did, she forced me to get out of a bad and dangerous marriage. Maybe that was her way of repaying me for all of the mean things she did when I was growing up. And Katie’s little signs, her telltale behaviors, I believe are her way of letting me know she’s back and that we can get on with having a loving relationship this time.”

Why Here Again?

Jessa’s parents are not religious, so they were surprised that their 2-year-old often spoke of heaven and told them stories about God. She said to them that before she was their daughter, she was God’s daughter, and before that, she had other parents and lived in a wooden house.

She told them that before she was born, she sat by God, and they picked out her parents because they needed someone like her in their lives.

Along with memories of a different life, children sometimes also recall memories of the time between lives. One 4-year-old in Bowman’s book said heaven wasn’t just a place to “relax and kick back. You have work to do there.” Part of that work entailed picking out your next family.

What children who remember being between lives describe is similar to the “other side” that near-death experiencers often describe. There are also hypnotherapy techniques developed to recall memories from that other side rather than past lives, revealing similar elements.

Research shows people often reincarnate in tandem with souls they have had different relationships with in past lives, perhaps to learn forgiveness by returning to someone who wronged us in the past, or the other way around—returning to someone we wronged to make things right, Bowman said. These “same-family cases” show that reincarnation is not random.

These cases demonstrate how dramatically personal reincarnation is, Bowman explained. In the same-family cases or family return cases, she witnessed transformative journeys in which both child and parent, and sometimes extended family, embarked together. Sometimes it was grandparents who had too little time to know their family, and sometimes it was children who died tragically young—even through miscarriage—coming back to the same mother.

In Wise’s case, her mother had come back to make things right.