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.
I once told one of my foster daughters something my grandmother had told me years earlier. She got quiet for a minute. Then she admitted that it had been so long since she’d seen her own grandmother that she’d forgotten what her face looked like....
Debbie Ausburn · July 23, 2026
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“No,” my foster daughter patiently explained. “I can go to college without getting good grades. I can write a killer essay about how my dad deserted us, my mom is a drug addict, and now I live with you old people who don’t understand me. I have more than enough victim points to make up for…
When I was a young adult, I got a letter from an old schoolmate apologizing for some of her behavior during our school days. The letter surprised me, mainly because I had no memory of the incidents that she described. I realized that I probably had been the victim of her bullying, but it didn’t…
One common theme in advice about how to respond to a child who is bullying another is to concentrate on teaching empathy. That task is easier said than done, and it can be particularly hard with a child who has suffered trauma. If you find yourself in that situation with one of your children…
Another problem that we can face with traumatized children is that they can become the bully in a given situation. Children who have suffered trauma, particularly violent trauma, can learn the message that they have to be the one in power to avoid abuse. Or they can unconsciously…
October is National Bullying Prevention month, so we will hear a lot about the topic over the next few weeks. If we parent children who have suffered trauma, our children are at high risk of being bullied. Their trauma makes them vulnerable, and vulnerable children are at much higher…
While we are talking about the importance of not trying to be perfect, let’s consider a common problem of deciding on consequences for rule violations, particularly when you and your spouse don’t agree. It’s a common area of conflict between parents, but I have learned that it also…
One of the common themes I hear, and have experienced, about raising other people’s children is how exhausting it can be. Parenting any child is difficult but stepping into a child’s history has its own sets of stressors. I have long thought that a big part of the problem is the high standards
Young adults recover from childhood trauma through a combination of supportive relationships and self-reliance, according to a survey of 13 previous mental health studies. The total sample size was small, only 277 young adults, but the small population allowed researchers to ask…
I often wonder what some of my now-adult children think about my blog posts, given that they lived through many of the mistakes that I have made. I imagine them rolling their eyes and saying, “It would have been nice if she had done that way back then.” And they are right. It would have been…
As we look at resilience this month, some mental health articles offer some interesting data about how we can help children exposed to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). An older study of sexually abused girls had a small sample size, but gathered information from in-depth interviews…
In my last post, I discussed the doctrine of logical consequences for motivating kids. In this post, I want to discuss the importance of low maintenance consequences that impact your child more than you. I have always had jobs that take a lot of my time, and many popular parenting…
Sometimes it’s hard to motivate kids to develop good habits and follow house rules. The technique that is easiest for us, nagging and lecturing, only works (at best) for a short time. Our instinctive response to just lecture longer and louder doesn’t help and can make things worse. To make any…