balancing-responsibilities

Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Four Important Principles for Balancing Our Priorities
ByDebbie Ausburn February 18, 2025

An important principle in setting priorities for your foster or blended family is understanding how to balance everyone’s unique needs. Younger children, for example, need more of our time than older children. Children who have suffered trauma have more complex needs than children who haven’t gone through those experiences. In addition to the usual work commitments, school requirements, and extracurricular activities, we have to find time and energy to encourage emotional healing and building trust. To meet all of those demands, we need to remember some important principles…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why Our Kids Need Us to Make Our Marriages a High Priority
ByDebbie Ausburn February 13, 2025

This week of Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember raising other people’s children requires us to prioritize our marriage after self-stewardship but ahead of our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our children’s needs ahead of our own. We should not put them ahead of our marriages…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why Core Values and Self Care Should Be Our Top Priorities
ByDebbie Ausburn February 11, 2025

When talking about how to set priorities, I always start with core values and self-care (actually self-stewardship) as the foundation. The reason I put those two at the bottom of the pyramid is that we can’t adequately care for our families unless we first put in place the resources that we will need to draw from…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Why It’s Best for Our Kids to Make Them Our Last Priority
ByDebbie Ausburn February 4, 2025

Being a foster parent or stepparent comes with unique challenges, but it also offers profound opportunities. One of the most critical lessons in this journey is understanding how to set priorities to create a solid foundation for your family. Over the next few weeks, I’ll post about why I think certain priorities come before others. Today, I want to give an overview and explain why I believe children should be last, instead of first in the order of family priorities…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

5 Tips for Being An Awesome Single Foster Parent
ByDebbie Ausburn February 15, 2024

Today is Singles Awareness Day, an unofficial holiday apparently designed to counteract the emphasis this week on Valentine’s Day. I’ve never been a big fan of the holiday, even as a single person, because it always seemed to me to have an artificial “make lemonade out of lemons” vibe. But it’s a good time to revisit a common question I hear, which is whether and how single people can be foster parents. I can say with no hesitation that it’s a challenging task, but raising other people’s children as a single person can be a wonderful and profound experience…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Five Tips for Learning to Appreciate Our Imperfect Spouses
ByDebbie Ausburn February 13, 2024

Given that Valentine’s Day is coming up, this week is a natural time to focus on appreciating our spouses. But sometimes we don’t feel very appreciative, particularly during the difficult journey of parenting a blended or foster family. One of my closest friends once confided, “I need a Valentine’s card this year that says, ‘I love you, even though you are absolutely completely wrong about our last argument.’” Many married couples can sympathize with that sentiment…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Areas of Agreement Essential to Keeping Your Marriage Strong
ByDebbie Ausburn February 6, 2024

An important, even essential, part of protecting your marriage in a blended or foster family is to be certain that you and your spouse have agreed on ground rules in several common problem areas. Managing (and minimizing) these conflicts requires clear communication and solid agreement between the adults in the family. In this blog post, we’ll explore the most common areas of potential conflict where parents need to be on the same page in order to cultivate resilient family relationships and get through difficult times…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Four Important Reasons You Need to Prioritize Your Marriage
ByDebbie Ausburn February 1, 2024

Last month, we discussed why self-care is an important foundation for a strong family. This month we’ll discuss why our next most important priority needs to be our marriages. Those of us with foster and bonus children need to make having a successful marriage a top priority, even ahead of our children. This principle goes against our instincts and our current child-centered culture, but it is the right thing for our families on many levels…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families Resilience

Why and How We Should Quit Taking Responsibility for Our Kids’ Happiness
ByDebbie Ausburn August 31, 2023

I’ve been thinking through the study I mentioned earlier this week, as well as previous research showing that children generally need less adult involvement in their decisions. Yet we are heading into a season where our instincts and current culture will take us in the opposite direction…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Foster Parents Often Feel Alone, But Three Ideas Can Help
ByDebbie Ausburn May 9, 2023

As we consider foster parenting this month, one rarely-discussed problem is how lonely the challenge can be. Raising another person’s child carries unique obligations. Your friends who have not dealt with the complex needs of foster children and…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Five Principles for Parents to Regroup and Recharge for the New Year
ByDebbie Ausburn January 3, 2023May 27, 2026

The new year is a popular time to plan a new start, but setting lots of goals for yourself is rarely the most effective way to move forward. Being a parent is hard work, and parenting other people’s children is particularly hard. Setting all sorts of new goals for yourself may just be setting you and your family up for…

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Foster, Adoptive, & Blended Families

Feeling Lonely as a Stepparent is Common, and There Is Help
ByDebbie Ausburn December 20, 2022

One rarely discussed issue with being a stepparent is how lonely you can feel in your new family. When you become a stepparent, you join your bonus family’s story halfway through. They already have a shared history, with customs and stories and family jokes that you do not (and cannot) share. Their bonds as…

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About YSO Insights

Evidence-based ideas and resources for youth-serving organizations and Plan B families, written by Debbie Ausburn, J.D., Donna Caudell, Ed.D., Gena Hood, Ed.S., Amber Jewell, LSCSW, and Tom Rawlings, J.D.

→ YSO Academy - Online courses and CE credits
→ Child Protection & Well-Being Trends -- Tom Rawlings' Substack about policy and best practices in child protection
→ Caudell Educational Solutions - consultation and testing for public, private and homeschool students
→ Hood Educational Services, LLC - training for teachers and student teachers
→ Amber Jewell - blog and speaking/training services
→ Youth Services Law -legal insights from Debbie Ausburn for youth-serving organizations