What Caring For a Rescued Abused Child From Yunnan Taught Me About Helping Traumatized Kids
The first time I saw Xiao Mi, she was curled under my desk at the small rescue center classroom outside Lincang, her dirty canvas sneakers peeking out from the leg of a too-big track pants. The aid worker who’d brought her that morning reached down to pull her out, and Xiao Mi bit her wrist hard enough to break skin. I still remember the chipped brown mud under her fingernails from picking walnuts, and the faint smell of wood smoke that clung to her hair even after she’d had a bath. She was 7 years old, and had spent almost half her life locked in a back shed by her grandparents, who’d blamed her for her parents leaving to work in a factory in Guangdong.
I’d signed up for the volunteer teaching placement after college, thinking I knew how to work with kids. I’d read all the popular posts about being kind and patient, but nothing prepared me for how completely shut down she was. For the first 10 days, she never made a sound. She only came out from under the desk when everyone else left for lunch. I used to leave a pack of mango hard candy on the corner of my desk every morning. I never mentioned it. I never looked at her when she crawled out to take one. After a week, she started staying out for five minutes after everyone left, just sitting on the floor by the bookcase, looking at the picture books.
Two weeks in, one of the first grade boys knocked over a jar of red tempera paint during art class. It shattered all over the linoleum, and bright red seeped between the tiles. Before anyone could move, Xiao Mi screamed – a thin, sharp sound I’d never heard from her – and scrambled back under my desk, curling so tight I could see her shoulders shaking. The other kids froze, and the aid worker started to reach for her to pull her out. I stopped her. I got a mop and a trash bag, cleaned up every bit of broken glass, wiped up all the red paint, and carried the jar shards all the way out to the dumpster. When I came back, I sat down on the floor next to the desk, my back against the leg, and didn’t look under. I just said “It’s all gone. No broken glass, no red paint. If you want to stay under there all class, that’s fine. I left my water bottle by the leg if you’re thirsty.” After about 10 minutes, a tiny voice came from under the desk: “I’m scared.” That was the first words she ever said to anyone at the center.
That’s when I realized most of the common advice I’d seen was wrong. Most guides say you rush in and comfort a scared kid, hold them, talk them down, help them “feel their feelings”. But Xiao Mi didn’t want comfort from me at that point. She wanted the thing that was scaring her gone, and she wanted to choose when to come out. I didn’t pull her out, I didn’t try to hug her, I just got rid of the trigger and gave her control. That’s the thing no one talks about enough for kids who’ve been hurt: control is the first thing they lose, so control is the first thing you have to give back.
I started making small, concrete changes that any parent or teacher can copy. I drew a faint pencil line 3 feet around Xiao Mi’s desk and told the other kids no one crosses that line unless Xiao Mi nods yes first. If she didn’t want to high-five or hug hello for circle time, no one teased her or asked her why. I never forced her to make eye contact when I talked to her; if I wanted to say something, I’d say it while I was sharpening pencils or stapling papers, not staring right at her. That took so much pressure off. I never once asked her what happened to her in that shed. A lot of people think you have to get trauma out into the open to heal, but pushing a kid to talk before they’re ready is just another kind of violation. It took her four weeks before she drew a picture of a small wooden shed with a walnut tree out front, and even then I just commented on how well she’d drawn the leaves, not the shed.
I left the center at the end of August, when my summer placement ended. The morning I left, I was packing my backpack by the door, and I felt a small hand slip into mine. It was Xiao Mi. She held it for maybe 30 seconds, then let go and ran off to play with the other girls. That’s the only time she ever touched me first.
I still get updates from the center every couple of months. She’s in first grade now at the local public school, she’s started joining the other kids for jump rope at recess, and she can eat a whole bowl of rice without hiding half of it under her mattress for later (that was another habit she brought with her from the shed). But she still sleeps with her bedroom door propped open an inch, and she still won’t get close to any of the male volunteer workers. No one’s pushing her to change that.
This isn’t a story about a miracle healing. It’s just a story about what works when you’re caring for a kid who’s been hurt. You don’t need fancy training or big gestures. You just need to let them set the pace, take away the things that scare them before you ask them to be brave, and stop counting down the days until they’re “fixed”. Some things take longer than a summer, or a year, and that’s okay. The work just keeps going, one mango candy and one open door at a time.
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