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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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…
“Oh, the new marriage is going well,” my friend said. “I adore my husband. The only downside . . . .” She hesitated, looked around carefully, then leaned forward and whispered, “I just don’t like his kids.”
For almost every foster parent or stepparent, there comes a time when a child announces, “I don’t want to be here,” or “I don’t want YOU to be here.” Or the message may not be direct, but a series of subtle slights that add up to the same…