YSO Insights serves two audiences with a shared purpose: keeping children safe and helping them thrive. For administrators and staff of youth-serving organizations, that means evidence-based guidance on child protection policy, mandated reporting, screening, and investigations. For Plan B parents — foster, adoptive, kinship, stepparents, and blended families — it means honest, practical guidance from people who have been there. For both, it means evidence-based ideas to encourage resilience and protect futures.
Summer co-parenting is one of those topics that exposes the gap between how blended and foster families look from the outside and what they actually require on a Wednesday in late June. When school is in session, the schedule does most of the work. The...
Debbie Ausburn · May 21, 2026
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Parenting kids who have gone through hard times requires that we understand childhood trauma. After years of not understanding the topic, suddenly everyone who works with children seems to be talking about being “trauma-informed.” To help our kids move forward, we must understand what trauma is as well as what it is not…
It’s that time of year again, when we Plan B parents have to deal with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. For stepparents and foster parents, the days may not be times to celebrate, but days that we feel forgotten or overlooked. All the attention goes to biological parents, and foster parents or stepparents are left on their own. Fortunately, there are some helpful ways we can prepare ourselves to avoid disappointment and enjoy the days in our own way…
Having a claim that a child has been injured in your program is every youth organization’s worst nightmare. Fortunately, you can start developing steps in your child protection policy that will help you be better prepared to deal with such a claim. By planning ahead,…
A gathering of Christian adoptive, kinship, and foster parents reminded me of some important lessons for raising other people’s children.
In this series about logical consequences, we’ve discussed principles for letting kids suffer the logical consequences of messes that they get themselves into. Sometimes we need to actually engineer a solution. For example, we can’t safely let a child learn the consequences of running into a busy street. But we often can engineer safe glimpses of what happens when they ignore a rule. Here are three key steps to engineering glimpses of real life for our kids…
In this second post on using logical consequences with kids, I want to discuss some more important principles of using the technique. These principles help us use logical consequences in a way that’s loving, practical, and sets our kids up for success…
As we continue to talk this month about using logical consequences with our kids, I want to focus on some very important principles of how to use them. If we don’t use consequences wisely and lovingly, particularly with kids who have suffered trauma, we can unwittingly compound the damage…
Returning to our theme this month of logical consequences, I want to talk about one very important principle — logical consequences only work with a lot of nurture and love. It’s easy to concentrate on the high structure part of letting kids learn from the consequences of their actions. At the same time, we can’t forget that our focus is on letting our kids learn — and they will learn best when we are there to empathize and help them learn. Logical consequences is all about both…
Today is National Siblings Day, and a good opportunity for foster parents to remember how important it is to keep our kids connected to their siblings. Not many people can foster an entire family of children. When we can parent only one or a few children in a family, or some siblings remain with biological family, we need to take on the added responsibility of helping our kids stay in touch with their brothers and sisters...
Sometimes when raising other people’s children, it’s difficult to tell whether we are having any impact at all. Our kids often seem so mired in the aftermath of their trauma that we can’t see how to help them move forward. A recent study gives us hope that our simply being a supportive presence in our kids’ lives can make a profound difference…
In my last post, I talked about how we define and think through logical consequences. In this post, I want to discuss why logical consequences work well for kids who have experienced trauma. There are several profound benefits that make logical consequences better than either lectures or unconnected penalties that we often try to use with our kids…
For the next few blog posts, I want to talk about one of the most important techniques I’ve found for helping children who have suffered trauma, which is using the logical consequences of their behavior. In some cases, we simply need to stand aside and let them learn from the consequences, such as getting a bad grade after waiting until the last minute to complete a project. Other times, we need to actually engineer a glimpse (a safe glimpse) of how the world works. In my next posts, I’ll discuss principles for using logical consequences, but first we need to establish exactly what I’m talking about…