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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A background check that satisfies your state’s minimum legal requirement can still miss the exact record that matters most. Organizations run the background check, treat a clean result as proof of due diligence, and move on. Neither the check nor the confidence it produces always…
I went for a jog today. It was a fresh, misty, slightly-chilly day. My favorite! It always feels great to walk outside for fresh air and open space where the only sound I hear is the beautiful tone of music I have singing in my ears. Not today….
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….
One of the biggest problems in youth organizations is staff burnout. In one survey of Colorado child welfare workers, half reported high levels of compassion fatigue. That’s not an unusual number for youth organizations. It’s a problem that we need to notice and address, because compassion…
Most administrators think of a code of conduct as a child protection tool. Attorneys and courts think of it as evidence. If your organization receives any federal funding, a written harassment or conduct policy will likely become a central exhibit in any serious Title IX…
None of us planned the path that led us into foster care, adoption, or a blended family. Many people call it a wrong turn. I call it Plan B parenting. There is an old aviation nickname that captures this better than any parenting book I…
On July 17, 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn with a flight plan filed for California. He landed in Dublin, Ireland twenty-eight hours later and blamed a faulty compass. History remembers him fondly as “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Your organization’s child protection program will…
Debbie Ausburn and Tom Rawlings are leading a free webinar on July 22 that walks youth-serving organizations through building a child protection policy that works in real life, not just one that reads well in a binder. The session runs 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET…
Suppose one of your kids takes forty dollars from your purse and lies about it for a week. You forgive him quickly. What you shouldn’t do is leave your purse open on the counter again. Global Forgiveness Day fell last week on July 7, and every…
Research on overparenting is giving youth administrators a useful tool: peer-reviewed evidence that age-appropriate independence is not a supervision gap. It is good program design. Understanding that research, and its limits, can help you push back on parent pressure, defend your supervision policies, and build…
This week, Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is easy to treat July 4th as a celebration of a single dramatic moment, a group of men signing a document and changing history. But the more instructive story is what happened…
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, had no idea how it would go. They were committing to a revolution whose outcome was genuinely uncertain. They could see what they were fighting for. They could not see whether it would…