What I learned caring for a rescued abused child: practical tips for foster caregivers and teachers
I’m folding hand-me-down third-grade uniforms on Xiao Man’s twin bed when my knuckle hits something solid under the thin cotton mattress. It’s the pair of fabric scissors I’ve been searching for three days. Xiao Man leans in the doorway, her ankle socks slipping down to her heels, and she flinches before I even turn my head. Her shoulders hunch all the way up to her ears, and she presses her back so hard against the doorframe I think she’ll leave a dent. That was two months into having her with me, after she was rescued from a remote village in northeastern Yunnan.
I foster school-age kids who’ve been removed from abusive homes, most from rural mountain areas where family breakdown leaves kids vulnerable. Xiao Man was seven when social workers brought her to me; her father was in prison for drug trafficking, her mother had left the province years earlier, and she’d been living with a distant relative who hurt her for more than a year before a visiting teacher reported the signs. The first week, she didn’t speak a single word. She ate all her meals standing up by the kitchen trash can, and I found crumpled leftover biscuits stuffed between her pillowcases every night.
I’d done this for three years before Xiao Man, but I still made every obvious mistake at first. When I found her changing her bed sheets at 2 a.m. after she wet the bed, I hurried over to help and went to put a hand on her shoulder. She fell backwards off the bed, hitting her head on the nightstand, and couldn’t stop shaking even when I kept repeating what I thought I was supposed to say: “I’m not going to hurt you. I won’t hurt you.” It took the local social worker, A-Mei, who’s been doing this work longer than I have, to point out how unhelpful that line is. All it does is put the idea of hurt right back in their head, she said. They don’t trust words anyway. They trust knowing what’s going to happen next.
She told me to start announcing every movement before I make it. If I’m walking into her room, I knock and say “I’m coming in to put your clean socks on the dresser” before I open the door. If I need to move past her to get to the sink, I say “I’m going to walk behind you to get to the faucet, okay?” No more sudden touches, no more sneaking up to pat her head or surprise her with a snack. At first it felt awkward, like I was talking to myself a lot. But after a week, she stopped flinching every time I moved around the house.
Back to the scissors. I used to think kids who hid things were being sneaky or misbehaving. A-Mei explained that when every part of your life has been controlled by other people who hurt you, hoarding small things is how you take back some control. I could have yelled, I could have taken the scissors away and punished her. Instead, I found that empty Pu’er tea box I’d been saving, sanded down the rough edges, and carried it in to her. I put it on the bottom shelf of her bookcase, right next to her worn stuffed rabbit, and said “This is your box. Only you get to put things in it, and no one opens it unless you ask them to. You can keep whatever you want in there.” I walked out and closed the door behind me. A week later, I saw the scissors sitting on top of the things inside it when she opened it to put a shiny rock she found on the sidewalk in. She hasn’t hidden any of my things since.
I got her a 1-liter mason jar that sits on her desk now. Every Sunday afternoon, we go to the corner grocery store, and she picks out whatever snacks she wants to fill it. It’s hers, she can eat any of it any time, no asking permission. She stopped hiding biscuits in her pillow after that. It’s not that she was hungry. She just needed to know there would always be food there for her, no strings attached.
Last weekend, we went to Green Lake Park downtown to feed the seagulls. A motorbike sped past the path and honked really loud right next to us. Xiao Man dropped her cone of mango ice cream and curled up on the sidewalk, shaking. A few people stopped to stare, and I saw a mom with two kids pull hers a little further away. A lot of people would have jumped in to pick her up and hug her and tell her it’s okay. But I just sat down on the curb a foot away from her, far enough that we weren’t touching, and ate my own vanilla ice cream. I said “That honk was really scary, wasn’t it?” That’s all I said. I just sat there and ate my ice cream and waited. After about five minutes, she leaned over a little and rested her head on my knee.
A lot of people ask me what you do to help kids like Xiao Man heal. They expect some big answer, or a story about how we fixed all the hurt. But the truth is, most of the work is just small, boring stuff. You don’t have to rearrange your whole life or have a fancy certification to start making them feel safe. You can start with these small steps: ask before you hug or touch, give them at least one small space that’s only theirs (it can be a shoebox, it doesn’t have to be a whole room), announce your movements so they don’t get caught off guard, and don’t push them to talk about what happened until they bring it up first. I’ve never asked Xiao Man a single question about what happened to her in that village. If she wants to tell me someday, she can. If she doesn’t, that’s okay too. Pushing her to open up just makes her feel vulnerable all over again.
It’s not all better. Some nights she still wakes up screaming, and I stand in the hallway until the screaming stops before I knock and ask if she needs anything. Last month she bit a boy at school who pulled her pigtails, and I had to go in and meet the principal to explain. She still doesn’t like to be in a room with a man she doesn’t know, and we don’t push that. Last week, she drew me a picture of a cat with a pink bow, and she signed her name at the bottom. She gave it to me without being asked. That’s the biggest win we’ve had so far. There’s a lot more road ahead, and I don’t know how it will end. But for now, the small stuff works.
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