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.
The first weeks of school went fine. Better than fine. Then, somewhere along the way, everything changed. The easygoing kid who did homework without complaint now fights bedtime, melts down over math worksheets, and talks back to the teacher who was “the best” a few...
Debbie Ausburn · September 8, 2026
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We’re headed into one of the most stressful times of the year for blended and foster families. Winter holidays can be a constant reminder for our kids that their world is off-kilter and different from what they want it to be. There’s nothing we can do to change our kids’ perception of the holidays, but we can take steps to
Our children steadily are becoming more anxious and depressed. Even before the pandemic, anxiety disorders and depression increased by 27% and 24% respectively among children. By 2020, 9.2% of kids studied had been diagnosed with anxiety problems and 4% had been diagnosed with depression. During the…
Resilience is one of the most important skills we can teach our kids, as well as one of the hardest ones to instill. One big hurdle is the narrative that our kids tell themselves about their lives. We want them to believe that they can accomplish anything. They often see themselves through the prism of whatever…
Bullying is an ongoing problem for many of our kids, and with the focus of October as National Bullying Prevention Month, we’ll see a lot of suggestions about how to prevent bullying. Contrary to what many parents (and children) think, not every insult or disagreement is a bullying situation. Sometimes a dispute…
Parenting is unique in that, if we do it right in the long run, we work ourselves out of a job. Our most important responsibility is to teach our kids how to develop into adults who don’t need us. Yet, in today’s protective culture, it can be hard to teach our foster or stepchildren the essential trait of self reliance. It’s a…
One common question I hear is whether people who work full time can be foster parents. The short answer is emphatically “yes.” You don’t even need flexible schedules or part-time work in order to foster full time. Those accommodations can be helpful, but they aren’t essential. I have spent my entire foster…
This week is Yom Kippur, one of the most holy days in Judaism. I am not Jewish and know little more than what I have learned from the Internet. Religious holidays are a good occasion, however, to visit the challenges in parenting a child of a different faith than ours. As the winter holidays approach, some of us…
I often hear questions from single people who are prospective foster parents, but who are worried about whether a single parent household could meet the needs of children placed there. I started out as a single foster mom, and then I later fostered with my husband. Both being a single mom and fostering as part of…
One essential part of self-care is setting clear boundaries of what we expect from each other. It can be hard to do that, especially when we know as foster or bonus parents that parenting our children requires some level of self-sacrifice. However, if we sacrifice too much of ourselves the relationships become toxic.
I sat with my arm around my foster daughter as she tearfully recovered from an emotional meltdown. I knew that I should have seen the warning signs and helped head off the triggering event. The fact was, I had accepted this placement too soon after my previous placement had ended rather explosively. I hadn’t
Most foster parents and many stepparents have to help our kids through bouts of anxiety and depression. Inevitably, the question comes up of whether to opt for medication and how much of it to agree to. Often it seems that therapy isn’t helping, and that medication is the only option. Some articles that I’ve seen…
“I can’t and I don’t have to,” my foster daughter announced. “I have a diagnosis, so I don’t have to do all of my homework if I don’t want to. I’m no good at school, and that’s just the way it is. Your nagging isn’t going to change anything…