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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In my last post, I talked about the importance of being mentors to our kids. Tomorrow is Tolkien Reading Day, and Tolkien’s works are a good reminder of the power of stories in our lives. The Lord of the Rings has become a cultural touchstone for many reasons, but primarily because it is a superbly crafted story…
One of the toughest parts of parenting other people’s children is recognizing that we are not the people who are supposed to be there. As I’ve explained before, from a child’s perspective, we are not supposed to be in their lives. They have an almost primal sense that, if the world worked the way it should, they would not…
I often hear from parents upset because their teen or pre-teen has suddenly developed a whole new personality, complete with teen “attitude” and cynicism. The vast majority of the time, those changes are developmentally normal and temporary. If we just wait, our kids will eventually grow up and revert to their old…
I have often felt that I just don’t understand the children that I am parenting. Their impulses often don’t make sense to me, and I can’t figure out why they make such bone-headed decisions. Most of the frustration comes from the fact that we have different personalities, and it takes work to understand each other…
A pattern that shows up very often in studies of resilience is a high correlation between resilience and self-esteem. It would be very easy to conclude that, if we help children develop self-esteem, we can also increase their resilience. These studies, however, only measure correlation, not causation. Furthermore, other…
One of the most frustrating aspects of parenting children with trauma is knowing whether they won’t make good choices or whether they can’t make them. The only answer I have found is that we rarely know which it is, so we have to approach every situation with humility and a large measure of grace….
As we head into warmer weather and spring holidays for school, we need to start planning how we are going to handle those holidays. I know it seems a bit early, but there really is no such thing as early with you are dealing with the complications of biological family or rules for foster children. Down time from school…
This week we celebrated President’s Day, and we’ve seen all the usual handwringing about what terrible and unenlightened people our ancestors were. Our modern culture seems to be intent on tearing down almost every well-known person in our history, believing that no one had any moral authority until we came…
Earlier this week, we celebrated Valentine’s Day, and the holiday prompted memories of my service as a single foster parent. I wouldn’t trade the experience, but I can’t deny that it posed its own unique set of challenges. Some of you may find yourselves forced by circumstance to be a single parent, while others may be…
One of the most important things we can do for our children is get them involved in groups outside school. Doing this is not easy, especially when it loads extra chauffeur and chaperone duties onto our already-long lists. If we can manage it, however, the benefits…
A recent study provides more evidence that positive relationships in childhood may mitigate the effects of adverse experiences. The study was small, only 113 women, and it combined self-reporting with physiological measures. Nevertheless, it adds a bit more…
For many years, I never paid any attention to the holiday of Groundhog Day. Then the movie came out, and I was captivated. Now I try to mark the holiday every year by watching the movie again. One year, I even coerced my adorable and long-suffering nephew into…