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…
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…
If you are my friend in Kansas and surrounding states, you get this…literally. Many, many days we see multitudes of continual rain engulfing much of the roads and fields we see each day. And, even though today glared the light called sunshine, overflowing rivers and newly…
Youth program staff spend a lot of time trying to reduce stress for the children in their care. That instinct is understandable, and within limits, correct. But a growing body of developmental research suggests the real goal should not be to minimize stress. We should…
The first time I tried a real vacation with a foster child, I planned it the way I would have planned any family trip. I researched the destination, planned the transportation, and made sure we had entertainment and snacks. What I had not planned for…
One of the things I learned slowly, too slowly, during my years as a foster parent was that I could not protect children into resilience. I tried. I arranged things so that failure was unlikely, intervened before frustration peaked, smoothed over conflicts that probably needed…
Building resilience in children from hard places is one of the things foster parents discuss most often when I attend conferences. It always comes up as a specific question: how, exactly, do you build it? And what does it look like when you are standing…
Spring announces itself with urgency. Trees leaf out. Lawns turn green overnight. The natural world signals renewal so loudly that the culture adopts the season as a metaphor for resilience—spring cleaning, fresh starts, new beginnings. For Plan B parents—foster, adoptive, and stepparents—this seasonal optimism can…
Every April 15, Major League Baseball pauses to honor Jackie Robinson. Every player, coach, and umpire wears number 42. The ceremony commemorates the day in 1947 when Robinson walked onto Ebbets Field and broke baseball’s color line—a moment of extraordinary courage that changed American sports…
A landmark 12-year longitudinal study reframes what your organization can do—and why it matters. Many staff members and leaders in youth-serving organizations carry a quiet tension. They engage with the ACE research, they understand the cumulative weight of adverse childhood experiences on the children and…
If you are a Plan B parent, you have probably had a version of this moment: you are watching your child struggle—with trust, with relationships, with behavior that seems to come out of nowhere—and a quiet fear settles in. What if the things that happened…
As a full circle foster child, foster care worker and foster/adoptive parent, the life I have had has not been a walk-in-the-park. I lived many days as a child scrounging for food and facing shame in foster homes of other broken caregivers and youth. For…