In 1990, HBO aired a documentary called Child of Rage. In it, a 6-year-old girl with blue eyes and a calm voice calmly described how she wanted to hurt her family.
Her name was Beth Thomas.
Nobody saw that ending coming, because nobody had seen her beginning. As a baby, she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her biological father. Then she came to live with Tim and Julie Tennent, along with her younger brother, Jonathan. But the damage had already been done. Doctors gave it a name: reactive attachment disorder. A child who had not learned to trust anyone and sought to feel safe through control.
Accounts say she hurt Jonathan, hid knives, and mistreated the family’s animals. In April 1989, her parents took her to a specialized attachment center.
That is the only path known. It was an intense and highly controversial therapy: the American Medical Association considers it pseudoscientific and abusive. In other cases, it ended in tragedy.
What is known is that Beth was later adopted by Nancy Thomas, an expert in children with attachment problems. She attended public school. She studied nursing.
Today, she is a registered nurse in the neonatal ICU at Flagstaff Medical Center in Arizona. She co-wrote a book with Nancy Thomas, More Than a Thread of Hope, and helps other families with children like she once was.
The media called her a psychopathic child. That label was an exaggeration. What she had was enormous trauma.
The girl who once frightened people is now the one caring for the most vulnerable.