Caring For A Traumatized Rescued Child: Practical Lessons From A Yunnan Foster Placement
I pulled back the sheets to change the linens on my third morning with Xiao Mei, and found six steamed buns crammed under her mattress, still wrapped in the plastic bags I’d sent them to school in. They were a little soggy, starting to turn, and she was pressed against the doorframe watching me, her shoulders up to her ears, like she was waiting for a hit.
Xiao Mei is 7, and was rescued from a remote village outside Zhaotong, Yunnan, earlier this year. Her parents struggled with addiction, and child protection workers told me she’d spent most of her life going from neighbor to neighbor begging for scraps, beaten whenever she asked for anything more than what she was given. I’m a part-time first grade teacher and have an extra room, so I agreed to take her as a foster caregiver while the system worked out a long-term plan. I’d had training, but nothing prepared me for those first few weeks.
She cleaned the entire apartment three times a day if I left to buy groceries. If I raised my voice even a little to answer a work call, she’d flinch so hard her pencil would fall off her desk. Two weeks in, I dropped a ceramic rice bowl while cooking, and it smashed on the tile. She immediately dropped to her knees and started grabbing the sharp shards with her bare hands, repeating “I sorry, I do it, don’t hit me” over and over. I knelt down next to her, pulled her hands away from the glass, and didn’t say anything about being safe or how I’d never hurt her. I just wrapped her hands in a kitchen towel, swept up the pieces myself, and then pulled a pack of hawthorn candies out of the jar by the stove and handed her two.
That’s the first thing I learned that no training really spelled out for me. Kids who’ve grown up with abuse and neglect don’t believe big, reassuring words. They’ve heard promises before that got broken, so they only trust small, repeated actions. When I found those steamed buns, I didn’t tell her she didn’t need to hide food anymore. I just got a plastic storage bin with a lid from the closet, set it on the floor under her bed, and said “this is just for your things. If you want to keep extra buns or candies here, you can. No one will touch them, and we can throw out the old ones whenever you want.” She didn’t say anything, but that night I saw her tuck a pack of cookies into it. It’s still there, half full of candy and dried fruit, and I never go near it unless she asks me to.
A month in, her homeroom teacher called me to say Xiao Mei had stolen a box of 24-color pink crayons from a classmate. The teacher wanted me to come in, make her return them and apologize immediately, and agree to a detention. I showed up, but asked if we could walk around the school playground first before we talked about it. I didn’t yell, I didn’t accuse her. I just said “I’ve seen you drawing pink flowers on your homework. What made you take that box?” She stared at her shoes for 10 minutes before she whispered that she thought if she asked me to buy her crayons, I’d get mad and send her back to the village.
That was the second big lesson. When these kids act out or do something that looks like bad behavior, it’s almost always a test. They need to see if you’ll still keep them, even when they do something wrong. Punishing her right away would have only proved what she already believed: that she only deserves to stay if she’s perfect. Instead, we walked to the stationery store down the street from the school, and I let her pick out any box of crayons she wanted. She picked the same pink 24-color set. Then we went back to the classroom, she returned the stolen box and apologized, and I helped her write her name on the new box with a marker and taped a little sticker on the side for good measure. It cost 12 yuan. That 12 yuan did more to build trust than any speech I could have given.
I’ve picked up a handful of small, concrete habits that work, that any caregiver can do, even if you’re not a foster parent working with a rescued kid. I keep a big whiteboard by the fridge with our daily routine drawn out, with little pictures for each part: breakfast, school, homework, walk, bath. If we need to change the routine for any reason, I tell her at least two days in advance, even if it’s something small like “we’re going to the grocery store after school instead of walking, okay?” Sudden changes are terrifying for kids who’ve never had any control over what happens to them. I never force her to hug me or sit next to me if she doesn’t want to. If she wants to hide in her room after dinner, that’s fine. I just leave her snack on the doorknob and let her come out when she’s ready.
It’s been eight months now. Some things are better. Last week she climbed up next to me on the couch to watch a cartoon, that’s the first time she’s done that on her own. She got a “most improved” sticker at school last week, and she taped it to the front of my whiteboard. She still flinches sometimes if I reach across the table quickly for a cup. She still keeps that bin of extra food under her bed. I still mess up: two weeks ago I was stressed from grading end-of-term papers, and I snapped at her for leaving her shoes in the middle of the hallway. She went straight to her room and didn’t come out for two hours. I knocked on the door, brought her a warm steamed bun, and said “I was wrong to yell. That wasn’t your fault. I’m still glad you’re here.” That’s all I said. She opened the door after a minute and took the bun.
We don’t know what the future holds. She might get adopted by a family out of the province next year, or she might stay with me longer. There’s no neat happy ending here, not yet. But the small things add up, one bun, one crayon, one predictable routine at a time.
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