How caregivers can help a rescued abused child adjust: What I learned from a 7-year-old from Yunnan
I was folding laundry on the couch last October when I heard the thud from the entryway. Seven-year-old Xiao Mi had just pushed the whole stack of rubber boots we keep by the door onto the floor, and she was huddled in the corner, arms wrapped over her head, before I even stood up.
We run a small foster home out of our apartment in Kunming, and we got the call about Xiao Mi a month before that. Local child welfare services had just rescued 14 children from a cluster of remote villages in northeastern Yunnan, where most of their caregivers struggled with addiction and cycles of intergenerational poverty. Xiao Mi was six then; her mother left when she was a toddler, and her father locked her in their one-room house alone for up to a week at a time when he went into town to use. When he came home, he’d beat her if she’d eaten the small bag of stored rice he’d left. The rescue got her out, but she had a persistent asthma issue that larger group homes couldn’t accommodate consistently, so she came to us.
The first 12 days, she didn’t speak a single word. She flinched if you moved your hand above shoulder level anywhere near her, she hid food in every crack of her bedroom, and she bit my forearm hard enough to break skin when I tried to clean a scraped knee after she fell off our porch. I’d read all the generic guidance online before she arrived: be patient, show her love, build trust. But that didn’t tell me what to do when she’s standing in the corner biting her own hand because I turned the TV on too loud. I had to figure it out as I went, small step by small step.
The first thing that worked was something that sounds silly at first, but it made all the difference: I started announcing every movement before I made it. If I’m getting up from the dinner table to walk behind her where she’s coloring, I say out loud, “I’m getting up to get more hot water, I’m walking past your back now.” If I need to grab a bowl from the cabinet above where she’s sitting, I say, “I’m reaching over your right shoulder for the blue bowl, okay?” It doesn’t need a reply, it’s just a heads up that a sudden movement is coming, so she doesn’t get thrown back into that place where any unannounced movement could be a hit. After two weeks of doing this every single time, she stopped flinching when I moved around the house.
The next big shift was with food. After the first month, I stripped her sheets to wash them and found three moldy steamed buns tucked under the mattress, along with half a pack of stale crackers. I was frustrated at first, threw them out and told her we have three meals a day every day, she never has to go hungry here. That night, I found three more crackers hidden in her sock drawer. I realized it wasn’t that she didn’t believe me. Her body still remembered what it felt like to be hungry for days on end, and hoarding wasn’t misbehavior—it was her way of keeping herself safe. So I made a small change: I cleared out the lowest shelf of our fridge, got a cheap plastic container with a lid, wrote her name on it with a marker, and stocked it with plain crackers, boiled eggs, and small mandarins. I told her she can take any of it any time she wants, no need to ask, and if she wants to hide some later, that’s fine too, I won’t throw it away. Within a month, the hoarding slowed way down. Now she only hides one or two snacks a week, usually in her backpack, and I just leave them there until she forgets about them.
Going back to the boot incident that October day: the night before, a volunteer had come over, reached over Xiao Mi’s head to ruffle her hair without warning, and that had set her on edge. She didn’t have the words to say she was still scared, so she knocked over the boots to release that tension. What I did then is what I do every time she has an outburst like that now: I don’t rush over to confront her or push her to talk about her feelings. I just clean up the boots slowly, talk about something mundane while I do it—like how the rain is ruining the lettuce I planted on the balcony—and then I leave a glass of warm honey water on the coffee table and go back to folding my laundry. I don’t push her to come out of the corner until she’s ready. Once, after a really big outburst, she came out an hour later and sat down next to me and drew me a picture of a stray cat we feed outside. That was all she needed to do; no big talk about trauma or feelings was required.
Last month, we went to the temple park outside the city, and Xiao Mi chased a yellow butterfly down the path until she was out of my sight. When she realized it, she ran back and grabbed my hand before she even thought about it. She pulled it away after two seconds, and I just kept walking like nothing happened, didn’t make a big deal out of it or gush about how proud I was. That’s the thing no one tells you about rescuing an abused child: the rescue doesn’t end when you drive them away from the village. It’s all these small, boring, unglamorous daily choices.
I don’t know what Xiao Mi’s future will look like. Some days are still really hard—last week she had two outbursts in one morning, and I had to sit on the balcony for 10 minutes just to breathe before I could go back in. But right now, she hasn’t gone hungry or been hit in 14 months. She tapes her drawings to our fridge, she chases butterflies, and she feeds the stray cat outside our gate every morning. That’s enough for right now.
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