What I Learned Caring For A Rescued Abused Child In Yunnan: Practical Tips For Caregivers And Teachers
7 a.m. at the small care home outside Dali, mist curling over the terraced rice fields behind the yard, I’m folding donated winter flannels on the wooden table, and I can’t find my fabric scissors. The hem of Xiao Man’s new rabbit-hood coat is frayed, and I wanted to tack it down before we go pick wild persimmons this weekend. I glance under the table, and there she is, seven years old, curled into the gap between the leg and the wall, her small knuckles white around the handle of the scissors, her eyes wide. She doesn’t move when I see her.
Xiao Man came to us two months ago, pulled out of a village an hour away by the local child protection team. Her mom left for factory work in Guangdong when she was two, her stepfather abused her for more than a year before a neighboring teacher heard her crying through the wall and called the national child protection hotline. I’m a retired primary school teacher, I come three days a week to help with homework and daily chores, so I’ve spent more time with her than most of the rotating volunteers that pass through.
I don’t reach for the scissors right away. I just sit back on my heels, keep my hands in my lap where she can see them, and say “That’s the scissors I needed to fix your coat. The frayed edge will scratch your neck when you run up the mountain. Do you want to watch me cut it after I boil the eggs for breakfast?” I wait a full minute before she slowly unfolds her body and sets the scissors on the edge of the table, still not looking at me. Later, the full-time social worker told me why she took them: the man who hurt her used a pair just like it to threaten her when she tried to run to the neighbor’s house for help.
A few weeks before that, a volunteer from a city charity came to visit, brought new stuffed animals, and kept wrapping Xiao Man in hugs, repeating “You’re safe now, poor baby, you don’t have to be scared anymore.” By the end of the visit, Xiao Man had locked herself in the outhouse toilet and wouldn’t come out for three hours. We had to slide her a bowl of porridge under the door. That’s when I started writing down the small things that work, because most well-meaning people don’t get it: they think getting a kid out of a bad situation is the end of the work, not the beginning.
The first thing I learned is that these kids don’t need big speeches or forced sharing about what happened to them. They need to get their sense of control back, one tiny choice at a time. We don’t make Xiao Man do anything she doesn’t want to without clear warning. Every morning, we ask her if she wants the blue bowl or the pink bowl for porridge. We tell her 10 minutes before any visitor comes, what their name is, how long they’ll stay. When we go for walks, we let her pick whether we take the short flat path or the longer one by the creek. None of these choices are big, and they take almost no extra time, but they add up. Before we started doing this, she would hide for hours any time someone new walked through the gate. Now she usually peeks around the corner after five minutes, instead of running.
When Xiao Man started at the local village primary school a month ago, her teacher told us she flinches every time the teacher walks past her desk, and won’t raise her hand to ask to go to the bathroom. We didn’t ask the teacher to attend a special training or rearrange the whole classroom to accommodate her. We just suggested she tape a little sticky note on the back of Xiao Man’s desk that says “knock first.” If the teacher needs to get close to check her work or help with a problem, she taps the edge of the desk first, gives Xiao Man a second to get ready. That’s it, no big deal, and in two weeks, Xiao Man stopped having accidents in class because she was too scared to ask to leave.
Another small rule we follow: if a child hides something small, or holds onto a weird scrap of fabric or a broken toy that doesn’t matter, don’t take it away. Xiao Man kept the scrap of hem I cut off her coat under her pillow for two weeks. I didn’t ask for it back. It didn’t hurt anyone, and it made her feel like she had something that was just hers, that no one could take away. That’s way more important than getting a scrap of fabric back. I’ve had other well-meaning caregivers ask me why we don’t “make her face her fears” and get past this stuff. But forcing it just makes her shut down more. If she’s scared of fireworks, we stay inside and eat dried mango and watch cartoons on our old tablet during the village festival. We don’t drag her out to “be normal” with the other kids.
Last weekend, we did go up the mountain to pick persimmons. The trail is steep, and the rocks are slippery from the morning rain. I held out my hand to her when we got to the tricky part. She looked at my hand for 10 seconds, then put her hand in mine. That’s the first time she’s let anyone touch her hand voluntarily, the whole time she’s been here. Her hand was small and sweaty, and that’s the biggest win we’ve had so far.
We still don’t know what’s going to happen long term. We’re looking for a permanent foster family, but most local families want younger kids, or kids that don’t have this kind of history. People still say she’s “quiet” or “strange” like that’s a permanent mark. Some days she still hides under the table when someone yells too loud, or won’t eat for half a day if something unexpected triggers her. That’s okay. We don’t need to fix her in six months, or a year. We just keep giving her the small choices, the heads up, the space she needs. That’s all any of us can do.
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