Attachment Therapy: A Practice That Killed a Child in 2000 Has a Direct, Traceable Line to a Child's Death in 2023
In 2000, ten-year-old Candace Newmaker was suffocated during a "rebirthing" session meant to cure her of an attachment disorder. The therapists were convicted of reckless child abuse, and Colorado banned the practice. But the pseudoscientific theory behind it never disappeared — it was carried forward by an unlicensed "therapeutic parenting" figure trained by one of Newmaker's own convicted therapists, whose techniques were cited by parents in the 2023 death of a four-year-old adopted boy.
What happened to Candace Newmaker
Candace Newmaker was adopted in 1997 by Jeane Newmaker, a pediatric nurse practitioner in North Carolina, after a childhood marked by neglect. When Candace began exhibiting behavioral difficulties, she was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) and referred to Connell Watkins, an unlicensed therapist running an intensive attachment therapy program in Evergreen, Colorado. In April 2000, mother and daughter travelled there for a two-week, roughly $7,000 program.
⚠️ A 70-minute session, videotaped as standard practice
On April 18, 2000, Watkins and an assistant, Julie Ponder, conducted a "rebirthing" session: Candace was wrapped tightly in a flannel sheet meant to represent a womb, then held down under pillows by four adults — weighing a combined 673 pounds against Candace's 70 — and told to "push her way out" to be symbolically reborn to her adoptive mother. The session was recorded, as Watkins routinely videotaped sessions for training purposes. On the tape, Candace can be heard begging to be let out and crying that she couldn't breathe; the therapists interpreted her distress as resistance and continued. She lost consciousness during the session, was declared brain-dead the next day, and died of asphyxiation.
Watkins and Ponder were convicted of reckless child abuse resulting in death in 2001 and sentenced to 16 and 10 years respectively. Colorado passed "Candace's Law" banning rebirthing therapy within a year of her death. Attachment therapy in its classic "holding therapy" form — physically restraining a child, sometimes for hours, while provoking distress the therapist frames as necessary "rage release" — has been linked to at least six documented child fatalities according to reviews of the practice, not counting Candace.
The theory behind it has no real basis in attachment science
Attachment therapy takes its name from legitimate attachment theory, developed by psychologist John Bowlby, but shares little of its substance. Real attachment theory concerns how early caregiving relationships shape a child's later ability to form secure bonds; it does not claim that physically restraining a child until they submit builds trust. Reactive attachment disorder is a recognized, if uncommon, clinical diagnosis, but critics — including mainstream child psychiatry organizations — have long warned that the broader, informal "Attachment Disorder" label used by fringe therapists is applied far too liberally to ordinary adjustment difficulties in adopted and fostered children, and used to justify coercive interventions with no scientific support.
The direct line from Evergreen to 2023
Nancy Thomas: no license, direct lineage to Newmaker's therapists
Nancy Thomas is a self-described "professional therapeutic parent" — by her own website's description, not a doctor, psychiatrist, or therapist of any kind — who became a therapeutic foster parent at the Evergreen, Colorado attachment center and trained directly under Foster Cline, one of attachment therapy's founders, and under Connell Watkins herself. After Watkins's conviction and release, Thomas thanked her in a book's acknowledgments, describing her as "retired." Thomas has spent decades since promoting similar restraint- and control-based "therapeutic parenting" techniques to adoptive and foster parents through books, camps, and paid consultations, continuing into the 2020s via recorded video counseling sessions.
In January 2023, four-year-old Skyler Wilson, adopted by a Surry County, North Carolina couple, died of a hypoxic-anoxic brain injury after being "swaddled" — found by his father lying face down on the floor, wrapped in a sheet and secured with duct tape. Court documents state the parents had taken recorded video counseling sessions with Nancy Thomas and told investigators the swaddling technique came from her guidance. Thomas said she had no knowledge of the specific incident. The Wilsons were indicted for murder and felonious child abuse nearly two years after their son's death.
A wider "troubled teen industry" problem
The same lineage of restraint-based "therapeutic" technique extends into the residential wilderness-camp industry serving adolescents with behavioral difficulties. Trails Carolina, a North Carolina wilderness therapy camp, drew scrutiny after a 12-year-old boy suffocated within 24 hours of arriving in February 2024 — an autopsy ruled the death a homicide by smothering after he was directed to sleep in a fully enclosed bivy sack. North Carolina's health department suspended the camp's admissions and removed all remaining children; the camp faced a separate lawsuit alleging a 2016 sexual assault and had a prior camper death on record from 2014. Former campers described being restrained in a tarp they called "the burrito" as a behavioral intervention — a restraint method reporters have directly connected to the same discredited attachment-therapy lineage.
A different register, the same pattern
This case sits apart from the biomedical interventions elsewhere in our Pediatric Quackery section — there's no supplement, dosing schedule, or dietary protocol involved. But the underlying pattern is identical to the GAPS diet, homeoprophylaxis, and the other cases documented here: an unlicensed figure builds authority through personal testimony and lived experience rather than credentials or evidence, packages a theory with intuitive emotional appeal to parents facing a genuinely hard problem, and continues operating largely unchecked even after the same underlying method has already killed a child once.