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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One challenge in raising other people’s children is handling the sheer volume of difficult behavior and advice about how to deal with it. One of the best things we can do for ourselves and our children is to start limiting the number of issues that we try to control and…
One of the most important things we can do for our kids is help them find mentors. Numerous studies show that a child’s having a positive relationship with an adult other than his or her parents is the most common factor connected to resilience. If we can be that person or help…
A new year is always a time when we hear and think about starting with a clean slate. It’s always such a tempting thought, but of course none of us can ever start with a completely clean slate. We always carry with us the results of our decisions and backgrounds. Our children, and perhaps…
Today is the start of Las Posadas, a charming Christmas tradition from Mexico that I learned about only a few years ago. It’s a good reminder that we can always learn from our children who come from a different faith tradition. If one of our children follows a…
We have just returned from a trip to Walt Disney World with a set of our kids and grandkids. Or as I like to refer to my family these days, some of my grandchildren and their domestic staff. (Priorities, you know). Of course, the trip reminded me that I no longer…
If your blended family or foster care placement are new, the holidays can be quite challenging. Not only do you have the awkward getting-to-know-you phase, but you have everyone’s holiday expectations layered on top of that. Here are some ideas that may help you navigate through the…
Holidays can be a difficult time, especially for foster or stepchildren. No matter how wonderful we are, their world is out of joint. They feel, whether consciously or not, that if the world worked the way it should, they would be with their biological family and would not know us. They may have…
As we look past Thanksgiving toward Christmas, we’ll face one controversy that crops up every holiday season, i.e., what to do about kids’ presents to their biological parents. As a foster parent, I never questioned that I needed to help my children strengthen whatever relationship they had with…
Many foster parents are able to eventually adopt their foster children. It’s a wonderful way to add to your family, and it’s an important step toward stability for a child. But as wonderful as adoption can be, it’s not a magic wand that resolves all of a child’s trauma. If…
Most advice to foster parents and stepparents, including mine, focuses on the challenges of parenting those kids. There’s good reason for that emphasis, as the job can be daunting. I’ve often said that raising other people’s children (cough) is the most challenging…
The fall & winter holidays always are difficult times for foster and blended families. Very few of us can manage peaceful meals with our kids’ extended biological families, and trying to plan all of the expected celebrations can be incredibly stressful. We have to balance competing needs of
One of our extended family emailed me last week, asking about our family plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was surprised, since I was still working on my plans for October. I hadn’t even thought about later months, much less made plans. At first I…