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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Sometimes a child’s complaint about fairness is just not liking a rule or not understanding what being “fair” actually means. Sometimes, however, the core message of “that’s not fair” is that the child doesn’t think we love him or her. If this is the message…
Last week, we discussed what we should tell ourselves when our kids claim we are being unfair. So this week, let’s talk about what we say to our kids. Responding to “it’s not fair” is particularly difficult when we are trying to blend step-siblings or transition a foster…
As we are thinking this week about being fair to all of our children, let’s first recognize that being fair is an illusion. Rather, we need to be just and that trait requires responding differently to each of our children’s unique needs…
One of the most common complaints our kids throw at us, and one of the hardest to handle, is “it’s not fair.” Children often see us as treating another child as “the favorite.” Even biological children will accuse us of…
An essential component to forging a solid relationship with our stepchildren is to spend quality time with them. There as many theories of how and when and what to do as there are researchers, therapists, and dictionaries. For this post…
Taking care of other people’s children requires a lot of sacrifice, and our stepchildren often don’t recognize our efforts for quite a while. But, just like biological children, if we hang in there long enough, our children eventually will develop the…
This week before Father’s Day is a good time to look at the importance of stepfathers and foster fathers in families. If our children have biological fathers involved in their lives, we need to do what we can to encourage that relationship…
Having your stepchild in your home only part-time can be a challenging situation. It can be particularly difficult when one group of children primarily lives with you, but their step-siblings are there only part of the time. How do you meld…
One common dilemma for stepparents is how to handle rules when your child lives with his/her other parent most of the time. How do you handle being only a weekend parent? My experiences as a foster parent taught me a few important…
As we head to the end of the school year, many of us start thinking about a family vacation. Our family loves to travel, and we have always taken a collection of younger relatives and friends along with us. Here are some techniques that we have learned over the…
This time of year is always busy, with the end of school and trying to plan for the summer. This year we have the added stress of navigating the ever-changing and contradictory advice about recovering from the pandemic lockdown…
Teenagers generally are the toughest audience for a stepparent or foster parent. Younger children are at a developmental stage where they are more likely to want a relationship with you and will accept you more readily.