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 of the hardest balancing acts in building a new family is setting healthy boundaries. We know that vibrant relationships require some level of self-sacrifice, but if we sacrifice too much of ourselves the relationships become…
According to the Internet, January 17 is “Ditch Your New Year’s Resolutions Day.” I have no idea who created the day or why. But it’s on the Internet, so it must be true. Because I like the one resolution I made this year (to be more boring)…
Now that our children are adults, we have the luxury of enjoying our empty house. Of course, my husband and I always will have projects. We both have jobs, and I (ahem) have a new book coming out in May (available for preorder now!)…
In the crush of taking care of our families during the holidays, we need to take care of ourselves as well. An important part of that is to be prepared if our kids overlook us. The first few times my foster children ignored me in the…
One controversy that surprised me after I married was buying presents for my stepchildren to give to their mother. As a foster parent, I never questioned that I needed to help my children strengthen whatever relationship they had with their…
Those of us parenting a child who started life in another family already know the challenges of navigating the holidays this time of year. Another minefield some of us face is the many different winter holidays for different faiths. If one of…
This time of year, I read and hear lots of questions about how to teach children gratitude. Parenting magazines and websites are filled with suggestions and techniques, all adding yet another thing to our lists of what-we-are-supposed…
November and December can be stressful times for blended families. The Norman Rockwell holiday ideal surrounds us, and our favorite traditions inevitably clash with someone else’s. What is supposed to be a season of gratitude and…
In this season of COVID and demonstrations, I have been struck by the continual insistence on treating people as victims of “the system.” I first encountered this philosophy when I was in law school, where I learned about Critical Race Theory.
Over the past few months, I have been pondering the power of personal narratives. It is inevitable that people will view events through the prism of their individual experiences. My minority friends read stories of black men killed by police…
Parenting children of divorce or other childhood traumas is daunting, but the good news is that positive experiences can help neutralize bad ones. A recently-published study looked at almost 500 children over 10 years, starting in their…
One of the things that revolutionized my parenting style was discovering the studies of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The term stems from a groundbreaking study in the late 1990s by the Centers for Disease Control and the…