What I Learned Caring For A Rescued Abused Child From Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers
Last April, I knelt on the linoleum of my Kunming kitchen, reaching for a bag of rice that had rolled under the fridge after a clap of thunder shook the cabinet, and found Xiao Mi curled there, her small hands clamped over her ears. She was seven, had been with me for three weeks by then, after child protective services pulled her from her uncle’s home in a remote village outside Lijiang. He’d locked her in a storage shed for most of the last two years, after her grandmother died and her parents left for factory work in Guangdong and never came back.
No one expected her to adjust quickly, but I still caught myself off guard by how small she made herself in every room. She wouldn’t sit at the table for meals. She’d flinch so hard when I turned the page of a book too fast that she’d slide off her chair. The first time my sister stopped by for a visit and laughed too loud, Xiao Mi didn’t come out from behind the water heater for four hours.
I’d been a foster caregiver for four years before Xiao Mi, mostly caring for kids whose parents were in treatment for addiction or had temporary housing issues. I thought I knew what I was doing. But the first month with Xiao Mi broke every routine I’d built. I tried the things I’d done with other kids: I asked her what games she liked, offered her ice cream for being good, told her she was safe here. None of it worked. It took me almost three weeks to figure out that all those offers were just more stress for a kid who’d never gotten to make any choices at all. Any decision she made before had led to a beating if it was wrong, so asking her to choose anything was terrifying.
The first small change I made that actually helped was stopping all open questions and open offers. Instead of asking “do you want a cookie?” or “would you like to go to the park?” I started just stating what was happening, in short sentences, and leaving the choice to her without waiting for a response. If I was making cookies, I’d say “I’m baking chocolate chip cookies, I’ll leave one on the windowsill if you want it.” If I was going to the park to walk the dog, I’d say “I’m leaving for the park in five minutes, the gate will be unlocked if you want to come or stay home.” At first, she almost never took whatever I offered right away. She’d wait until I left the room, or until I was already down the street, before she’d take the cookie or slip out the door to follow. It sounds like such a small thing, but for a kid who’d been beaten for asking for a drink of water, not being put on the spot to perform “being okay” takes a huge weight off. After two weeks of this, she started sitting at the table for meals, ten minutes after I sat down, but she sat.
The second change was naming every sudden movement I made around her, even when it felt silly. I realized early on that any time I reached over her head to get a glass from the shelf, or reached quickly to catch a falling plate, she’d freeze and her hands would start shaking. I started just saying what I was going to do before I did it: “I’m going to reach over your shoulder for the remote now.” “I’m going to step around you to open the door.” It’s not something you ever think to do normally, but it lets her prepare for a movement that would otherwise trigger that instinctive fear. After six months, she stopped flinching when I reached for things near her. Last month, she even started doing it back: when she walks past me where I’m sitting on the couch, she’ll say “I’m going to get my backpack off the coffee table now.” It made me realize how much of the fear for these kids comes from not knowing what’s going to happen next, even in tiny, ordinary moments that the rest of us never think twice about.
I got a lot of well-meaning advice from other people when I first took Xiao Mi in, the most common being that I should encourage her to talk about what happened to her. I tried that once, early on, when we were driving past a farm with a blue storage shed by the road, and I said “that looks like the shed you stayed in, doesn’t it?” She didn’t say anything, just curled up into the footwell of the car and didn’t move for the rest of the ride. I never did that again. Instead, I just acknowledge what she shows me, and leave it at that. When she draws a picture all in black crayon, I say “that looks really heavy” and leave it on the fridge, no more questions. When she mentioned three months ago that the dark smells like wet straw, I just nodded and said “that must have been really scary” and we went back to folding laundry. She hasn’t mentioned it again, and that’s okay. Pushing her to unpack it before she’s ready just makes her shut down.
Xiao Mi has been with me for almost a year now. She’s started second grade, and she likes to pick dandelions on the walk home and blow the seeds into the yard. She talks to my cat nonstop, even when the cat ignores her. She still hides under the dining table when there’s a thunderstorm, because the thunder sounds like her uncle slamming the shed door. She still won’t go to sleepovers at her friend’s house, and I don’t make her. Some days I worry I’m doing this wrong, that I’m not pushing her enough to get past what happened. But then I’ll come home from the store and she’ll be sitting on the couch waiting for me, instead of hiding in her room, and I know we’re going at the right pace.
There’s no neat happy ending here. We’re still taking it one day at a time. But these small, boring changes I made are the things that actually worked, not the big grand gestures people talk about. You don’t have to fix a kid who’s been hurt all at once. You just have to stop adding more pressure to the weight they’re already carrying.
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