If you check out photos from Katie Tomlinson’s childhood, like those included with her company bio, what do you see? A little angel, right?

“Wrong,” declares Katie. “I was anything but! In fact, I wasn’t just adventuresome, I tortured my parents.”

Tortured?

When you listen to her stories, you will see her point.

How about:

• At age two or three, Katie so practiced ignoring what her parents told her that they referred her to a hearing specialist, fearing she might be suffering an auditory deficit. Nope, just an attention-to-parental-instruction deficit—little Katie’s ears worked just fine.
• At about age six, Katie found herself embroiled in an emotional disagreement with her mother. Echoing the expert conflict resolution skills shown on TV—of a quarrelsome wife who’d dumped her husband’s clothes in the street—Katie began tossing her possessions to the curb, from her second-floor bedroom window. She was starting in on the furniture before her mother restrained her. You might say she pitched a fit by pitching her stuff—no doubt an arresting and Amityville-esque diversion for the neighbors!
• By age ten or so, Katie’s tastes didn’t fit her mother’s well-intentioned but not always appetizing efforts to serve healthy meals. She literally went round and round with her parents about eating, her father chasing her around the table.  Told to sit until she took a bite, she sat; mealtime incarceration merging, hours later, into bedtime.
• Before she turned 12, Katie’s parents had accrued an entire library of resources on “Dealing with the Strong Willed Child,” —including titles like, “Raising Your Own Rosemary’s Baby.”

Here’s the kicker: By age 15, those typically ‘terrible teen’ years, Katie’s inner angel began shining through as the “play nice” credo of kindergarten belatedly kicked in. Katie became Best Friends Forever with her perfectly nice older sister and formerly embattled parents, who promptly exorcised their collection of child-rearing books via a garage sale. She calmly proceeded through high school and a degree in business and psychology (hmmm) with an emphasis on information systems.

To watch her today, in her scary-neat office, ensconced in her macro-developing, program-reporting, Excel spreadsheet guru-ing and media analyst-overseeing niche as PlattForm Advertising’s Director of Media Resources, you would never guess that sweet Katie once sported Bad Seed horns. Unless, or until, you lie to her and imply that the devil made you do it. (Hint: she knows better, so just don’t!)