Six-year-old daughter cares for paralysed father after her mother abandons them both

A woman who vowed to stay with her husband in the good times and the bad broke her promise when her husband became paralysed in a car crash. Instead of staying by his side in his time of need, Tian Haicheng’s wife of 7 years abandoned him when he was left paralysed from the chest down after a taxi he was in crashed into a ditch in March 2016.

Tian said, “She told me on the day that she was going to stay in her mother’s home for a few days. But she never returned, and she took our son with her.”

Besides leaving Tian and taking their eldest son with her, Tian’s wife also left behind their six-year-old daughter who has been taking care of her father ever since.

While many children her age enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle, six-year-old Jia Jia gets up at 6am everyday and massages her father’s muscles for half an hour. The kindergartner brushes his teeth and washes his face before she heads to school.

Jia Jia’s elderly grandparents, both farmers, step in when their granddaughter is at school to help care for their son. When Jia Jia returns from school, she takes over and feeds her father his dinner and helps him move around their home with a DIY mobility device.

Besides helping her father apply medications and carry out other tasks he can no longer do, Jia Jia even helps her father shave his face.

The young child said, “At the beginning, I didn’t know how to shave and I cut dad’s face and it bled. But dad said it wasn’t painful. Now, I’m very good at shaving his beard. My grandmother says I shave it very clean.”

When asked about whether she misses her mother, Jia Jia said that she doesn’t miss her at all because “she doesn’t look after dad.” She, however, dearly misses her brother whom her mother took with her when she left: “I used to be very close to him.”

Tian set up a live-stream of his daily life with his daughter, to document Jia Jia’s selfless spirit, on Chinese website Kuaishou. The father-daughter pair have a loyal following of almost half a million subscribers who follow their daily struggles.

One video showing Jia Jia care for her father also went viral on Youtube and social media, leading hundreds of netizens to extend their sympathy and admiration to the small family: