YSO Insights

Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Six Important Lessons We Can Learn from Fairy Tales
ByDebbie Ausburn February 25, 2025

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sucker for made-up holidays, and this week is no different. Tomorrow is National Tell a Fairy Tale Day, and it prompted me to start thinking about what fairy tales can tell us about foster and blended families. I’ve written before about what fairy tales can tell us about being the mentor rather than the villain in our kids’ stories. Today I want to look at some of the other lessons that fairy tales can teach us about raising other people’s children…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Four Important Principles for Balancing Our Priorities
ByDebbie Ausburn February 18, 2025

An important principle in setting priorities for your foster or blended family is understanding how to balance everyone’s unique needs. Younger children, for example, need more of our time than older children. Children who have suffered trauma have more complex needs than children who haven’t gone through those experiences. In addition to the usual work commitments, school requirements, and extracurricular activities, we have to find time and energy to encourage emotional healing and building trust. To meet all of those demands, we need to remember some important principles…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why Our Kids Need Us to Make Our Marriages a High Priority
ByDebbie Ausburn February 13, 2025

This week of Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember raising other people’s children requires us to prioritize our marriage after self-stewardship but ahead of our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our children’s needs ahead of our own. We should not put them ahead of our marriages…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why Core Values and Self Care Should Be Our Top Priorities
ByDebbie Ausburn February 11, 2025

When talking about how to set priorities, I always start with core values and self-care (actually self-stewardship) as the foundation. The reason I put those two at the bottom of the pyramid is that we can’t adequately care for our families unless we first put in place the resources that we will need to draw from…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why It’s Best for Our Kids to Make Them Our Last Priority
ByDebbie Ausburn February 4, 2025

Being a foster parent or stepparent comes with unique challenges, but it also offers profound opportunities. One of the most critical lessons in this journey is understanding how to set priorities to create a solid foundation for your family. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post about why I think certain priorities come before others. Today, I want to give an overview and explain why I believe children should be last, instead of first in the order of family priorities…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why We Have to Repeat Ourselves and How to Be More Effective
ByDebbie Ausburn January 30, 2025

Next Sunday is Groundhog Day, a holiday that, because of one of my favorite movies, has become forever linked with repeating the same day over and over. That’s a familiar sensation, whether we are foster parents, step-parents, or biological parents. Parenting often feels like a revolving door of reminders: “Say please,” “Don’t forget to wash your hands,” “We don’t hit when we’re angry.” No matter how many times…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families Resilience

Participation in Team Sports May Boost Executive Function in Our Kids
ByDebbie Ausburn January 28, 2025

A study of Dutch school children indicates that participation in team sports correlates with increased executive function in children. The study followed 880 Dutch children from 2006 through 2017. The researchers used meters to measure physical activity in children at ages 5 to 6 and questionnaires to assess sports participation in children ages 10 to 11. The study then had parents complete a questionnaire that measures executive function. “Executive function” is a phrase that encompasses thinking skills that children need to organize facts, remember details, make decisions, and stay focused.

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

How We Can Become the Mentor in Our Children’s Stories
ByDebbie Ausburn January 23, 2025

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…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

How We Should Respond as Our Kids Deal with the Loss of Their Families
ByDebbie Ausburn January 16, 2025

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…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

How We Will See Our Kids Processing Their Loss
ByDebbie Ausburn January 14, 2025

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…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Our Foster and Step Families Begin with Deep Loss
ByDebbie Ausburn January 9, 2025

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…

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Child Protection Policies Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Start Your New Year with an Audit of Your Child Protection Policies
ByDebbie Ausburn January 7, 2025

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…

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About YSO Insights

Evidence-based ideas and resources for youth-serving organizations and Plan B families, written by Debbie Ausburn, J.D., Donna Caudell, Ed.D., Gena Hood, Ed.S., Amber Jewell, LSCSW, and Tom Rawlings, J.D.

→ YSO Academy - Online courses and CE credits
→ YSO Partners - Child Protection Culture, Not Just Policy
→ Child Protection & Well-Being Trends -- Tom Rawlings' Substack about policy and best practices in child protection
→ Caudell Educational Solutions - consultation and testing for public, private and homeschool students
→ Hood Educational Services, LLC - training for teachers and student teachers
→ Amber Jewell - blog and speaking/training services
→ Youth Services Law -legal insights from Debbie Ausburn for youth-serving organizations