Author Amy Molloy reveals how her son’s past lives help her parent today

Author and journalist Amy Molloy believes her son is a reincarnated healer from centuries ago – and shares how that helps her parent him today.

Author Amy Molloy on her new book, Wise Child, which explores past-life parenting.

When Amy Molloy’s son was born, she knew there was something “different” about him. He didn’t behave like her daughter, a “dream baby” who had been like “a little ray of sunshine”. He seemed to struggle with his new environment. Noises and busy stimuli left him unsettled. He cried a lot.

“His birth was harder and I was scared, it just felt more fearful for me. I would say to my husband ‘he just doesn’t seem to want to be here. I can’t put my finger on it, but he just doesn’t seem like he feels safe or that he wants to be here with us now’,” says the journalist and author, who went searching for answers.

“All his tests were completely fine but I just couldn’t shake this feeling.”

Her quest sent her down an unusually transcendental path – and ended up drawing surprising conclusions that would introduce her to the power and effectiveness of past-life parenting.

The former magazine editor was told that her baby boy was the reincarnated soul of an ancient wise healer from an Arabic country who had not been reborn for many centuries. The revelation came from a trusted, London-based spiritualist, who had given her solace and support after her dad became paralysed overnight and was then diagnosed with cancer when she was just 17.

Amy Molloy has three children with her husband, Kurt. Picture: Supplied

Amy Molloy believes her husband, Kurt, has past-life connections to the ANZACs and Peru.

Amy Molloy has explored her own past lives, which include one where she died from drinking contaminated water.

The theory about her little boy made immediate sense to Molloy.

“He was finding it so jarring to be thrown into the modern world,” she says.

“It all felt like too much, too soon for him. Even the birth had felt too much, too fast, and then thrown into this hospital with bright lights and all the people around, thrown into this modern world with how stimulating it is. He was really struggling to adjust from the life he would have known before to the life that he had been thrust into.

“(The spiritual healer and I) talked about the fact that he’s deeply empathetic, he’s going to feel really deeply because he’s been used to, in his old life as a healer, really having to connect with people emotionally to help them. And so she said, ‘you are going to have to mother him in a different way to your other child. He’s always going to feel deep faith. He’s always going to be hypersensitive to things like modern stimuli and other people’s emotions. But if you can teach him how to work with that then, once again, he has the potential to be a great healer in this lifetime.”

The discovery proved so profound for the award-winning author, she has now written a book about the way it has transformed the way she parents her three young children now aged four, six and eight.

Amy Molloy says she doesn’t see her three children as “just this three, six and seven-year-old, I see them as whole people who are just as complex as me, a 40-year-old”.

Wise Child, which is billed as a “practical guide to raising kids with sensitive hearts and smart souls in a world they were reborn to save”, explores the unconventional phenomenon of past-life parenting.

“I think when I understood that my son is not just this one-year-old, he is this complex soul who has brought all of these experiences forward with him,” says Molloy.

“It gave me so much more patience and empathy for the days he did struggle. But also I started, as he grew up, to write down the things that he said. My healer said ‘he’s going to come out with bangers, he’s going to drop some knowledge that you’re going to want to remember’.

“It shifted how I parented him and then how I parented all of my kids, because I think before that I was trying to do this cookie cutter approach to like, well, this worked with my daughter.”

It’s not the first time a past-life revelation has shifted the now-40-year-old’s own reality.

As a grieving young widow at the age of 23, she reached out to her spiritualist to try and find a connection to her first husband, who died from cancer just a month after they were married. At the time, she was also struggling with an eating disorder that had developed as she tried to wrest some control over her life.

“My spiritualist told me that in a past life I had died from drinking contaminated water and so in this life that had created this fear around drinking or eating things that were unsafe,” says Molloy, who felt an “immediate light bulb moment”.

“It just instantly hit me – ‘yes, that is absolutely what it is ... that’s the missing piece’.

“I’ve done traditional therapy for my eating disorder, I had done (cognitive behavioural therapy) ... and yet when I learned this past-life memory, it was like ‘that’s what I need to understand to get over this’. And so from then on, every time I felt like this fear around eating – if I’d go out to dinner or someone else had cooked a meal, which normally would really cause me severe anxiety – I could sit there and go ‘this is not a real fear, this is a past memory that you are experiencing now. It’s an old story. You’re safe and you can let it go’.

“I would say I’m fully in recovery from my eating disorder, it’s still like an old movie that can run in my head if let it, so I choose not to press play. The past-life regression was enough to put a full stop on it for me. And for me, that was the difference between recovering and not, that was the final thing for me. And so I had this experience of how healing it could be.”

The author, journalist and mum – who now lives on the NSW south coast with her husband of 11 years, Kurt, 40, and their three children aged four, six and eight – has drawn on her own successes with past-life parenting in her unconventional new book, Wise Child.

Author Amy Molloy: “My first husband will pop up again, for sure, we have absolutely unfinished business 1000 per cent.”

She’s also embraced the stories of other families who have been open to the insights that their children have spontaneously offered up.

Molloy is quick to point out that not all of those families are “new age or hippy”.

“What I really loved and what has surprised me the most was when I put a call out on social media, the people that reached out to me were my tradie mates or Catholic friends or people not necessarily in the new-age space,” she says.

“People would say ‘you’ll never guess what my little girl said’, or ‘my little boy says he’s terrified of going swimming because he drowned in a past life’.

“It’s not just a niche book, it’s not just a niche conversation.

Molloy says ditching “hierarchical” parent-child relationships – and looking for the “breadcrumbs” of wisdom dropped by her children as they relay memories or reflections from their past lives – has been a game-changer for her family.

She listens when her children tell her not to be afraid of death because they will all be together again one day. Or when they talk about their “other mummy” or a country they once lived in. She’s open to what they say about the “hot-button topics like life, death and gender – all the big ones”.

And she courts what she calls their reincarnated wisdom to help problem-solve life’s big decisions in a collaborative, family effort. It’s one of her top tips for past-life parenting.

“They’re wiser than us ... I value their insight. It’s breaking down that hierarchical idea that parents are the dictators and have all the answers and kids are a blank slate and don’t know anything. And it’s really shaking up that view and saying, in many ways, this generation coming through – my kids and their peers – are incredibly eloquent and intuitive and insightful,” says Molloy, who believes that today’s children have chosen to be born into a time of great challenge and change.

“The world is in chaos and they’ve chosen now to be reborn.”

Molloy, who keeps a notebook on hand to record the insights that each of her children share, says after the age of seven, a child’s connection to their reincarnated lives dims from the repressions of social norms and conditioning.

She says parents have a choice – to trust their child’s intuition and wisdom or repress and suppress it and “raise a generation of kids who are scared to say and share”.

“Most kids by the age of seven will stop talking about past-life memories, will stop talking about these things because they learned that it’s not okay to talk about it. So how can we nurture it in our kids .. how can we teach them that it is okay,” says Molloy, who has “no answers ... but I’m open and curious” about how reincarnation works.

“Kids are so insightful and intuitive and they can read energy but a lot of us just shut that down because the world hardens us up and we learn what’s appropriate.

“So when kids across the world are talking about their past lives and saying, ‘I used to have another mummy or my mummy used to be my daughter, I remember dying in a plane crash’ or whatever it is, if they’re remembering that, maybe we should listen.”

Author Amy Molloy’s new book.

“I think it’s changed our whole family, everybody has benefited from it,” says Amy Molloy.

Molloy says birthmarks and unexplained phobias were some indications of past-life trauma.

“Look for patterns in fears – fear of water, heights, going on planes, sitting in a certain spot in a car because a child remembers being killed in the car in that spot,” she says.

“People with birthmarks can be a sign of injuries or wounds from a past life, maybe they were stabbed or shot in that space. There’s past-life rejection, separation and heartbreak that shows up in this life. There’s a lot around gender ... children that remember having a different gender in a previous life then identify with that gender in this life.”

Molloy has explored the past lives of her son and eldest daughter, who she believes was a herbalist in a historic village. She has not yet felt the need to delve into that for her youngest daughter, a “spirited, strong little Covid kid”.

She has tiptoed into the past lives of her husband – a “very sceptical scientist” – and discovered connections to the ANZACs and also to Peru, where they travelled together.

“He proposed to me at the bottom of a mountain near Macchu Picchu. He hadn’t planned it, he just felt like he needed to ask me,” says Molloy, who believes her entire family – including her first husband, Eoghan Molloy – have all been part of her past lives and will be in her reincarnated future.

“I do think we will come together in whatever relationship that is to come and even that is beautiful,” she says. “I say to my kids when I put them to bed ‘I love you in this lifetime and I love you in every lifetime’. Maybe they’ll be my mum and get their payback.

“My first husband will pop up again, for sure, we have absolutely unfinished business 1000 per cent.”

Molloy says past-life parenting gives hope to families, who can have faith in their children’s resilience and wisdom to “weather whatever storms are ahead of them”.

“Because they’re not just these clean slates and innocent kids who are going into the world with their eyes closed, they’re already entering the world with incredible wisdom and lots of life experiences,” she says.

“I think it’s changed our whole family, everybody has benefited from it. I don’t see them as just this three, six and seven-year-old, I see them as whole people who are just as complex as me, a 40-year-old. It’s definitely taken the pressure off me as being the mum who has the answers to everything.

“I always say as a journalist, I write where I’m led. I never thought I’d be writing about past-life parenting, but it feels like part of my own soul contract to be writing this and sharing this. It feels like part of the reason I was reborn in 1984.”

Originally published as Author Amy Molloy reveals how her son’s past lives help her parent today