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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I like to describe raising other people’s children as learning how to fit into the stories that our children tell themselves. We humans are story-telling animals. For thousands of years, we have used stories to learn and make sense of our reality. Our children have done the same thing from their earliest days. They have a narrative of their life, and when we enter it, they have to figure out where we fit…
Helping our kids process the loss of a biological family and new family dynamics can challenge even the most patient caregiver. Here’s how we can respond in ways that can build a healthy blended family or at least not torpedo whatever fledgling relationships we have with the children we are parenting…
In my last blog post, I discussed the unavoidable reality that our journey as a foster or stepparent begins in a child’s loss. Our children will spend a lot of time grappling with their desire for an intact biological family. In our relationships, we’ll see a few common patterns in how they process their loss…
When we create a new stepfamily or become foster parents, we like to think of the transition as a fresh start for our children, a new chance for stability, love, and belonging. And we can certainly build strong relationships with our children, no matter when we join their history. But we can’t overlook the profound reality that our new family starts with a loss for our children. We will see this loss play in different ways in our individual situations, but there are some common themes that we are likely to see…
The beginning of a new year is a traditional time to make new plans. For youth organizations, it is also a good time to take a close look at child protection policies to determine which ones to keep or change going forward. Not only will…
Our new understanding of childhood trauma is wonderful in many ways, but I’ve also seen some disturbing downsides. As we try to help our child trauma survivors overcome the effects of their experiences, it is essential to avoid the twin evils of (1) making a child’s traumatic event the central focus of their life, and (2) believing that they cannot overcome the effects of that trauma…
When I first started foster parenting more than 30 years ago, no one had heard of trauma-focused techniques. Now, the phrase is everywhere. In fact, it’s become so popular that it’s hard to know what the word “trauma” means these days. The first step in parenting children who have suffered trauma is to know what we’re talking about…
One vexing part of parenting is watching our kids make decisions that we know will turn out badly for them. Children who have suffered trauma seem to be particularly prone to making problematic decisions. How do we respond when our children insist on making life decisions that we simply cannot support? Below are some thoughts about how to keep lines of communication open with our children when we can’t agree with their decisions.
We’ve discussed principles for parenting kids who reject you, but sometimes that rejection can be so deep that any sort of healthy relationship is impossible. What do you do when your relationship with your foster child or stepchild starts feeling toxic? How can you live with that child and still preserve a healthy blended family? There are no simple solutions, but there are some principles that can help you get through the challenges of parenting a child who insists on a toxic relationship…
Once we’ve thought through what treating our kids the same means, we have to know how to communicate to them that we care about them equally. It’s particularly difficult when we are trying to blend step-siblings or transition a foster child into our home. The non-biological children are extremely sensitive to favoritism, and often see it when we don’t think it exists. They also tend to interpret any different treatment as unfairly letting someone else get away with breaking the rules. So we need to figure out how to communicate to our kids that they are a part of the family just as every other child in our home. As with most parenting challenges, there are few hard and fast rules, but there are some important principles that can guide us…
One mantra we hear as foster and stepparents is to treat all of our kids the same. It’s also much easier said than done. Stepchildren and foster children often will accuse us of treating our biological children as our “favorite.” It’s not a complaint we can counter with words. We have to live it out and let our kids see that we love them equally. But first, we have to look at ourselves and understand how to think about the problem…
It’s easy to talk about building good relationships with foster and stepchildren, but what if you don’t like your kids? It’s very difficult to find the motivation to build a close relationship, or even a marginally good relationship, with someone whom you don’t like. This dilemma is a more common situation that we want to admit, but we shouldn’t be surprised when it happens. I was fortunate in that my stepchildren were generally delightful, but I have parented foster children that I had to struggle to like and care about. While I never found a magic solution, I was able to find several principles that helped us move toward a more positive relationship…