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
Read Post →Somewhere in the stack of training materials, agency handouts, therapist recommendations, and well-meaning advice you’ve collected as a foster parent, adoptive parent, or stepparent, there is research. Some of it has shaped how you think about your child. Some of it has shaped what you’ve…
You built your program to be a place where children thrive. Your staff show up every day because they care about kids. None of that protects you from one of the hardest realities in youth program work: children sometimes harm other children, and the conditions…
National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day falls on May 31, and it is one of the observances I find hardest to let pass without saying something. Not because the statistics are new to me (though they remain stunning), but because the question underneath…
Saturday, May 31, is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. The observance exists because what happens to young people at the moment the system releases them is, by most measurable standards, a national failure. Approximately 20,000 youth age out of the U.S. foster…
May 31 is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. Every year, approximately 20,000 young people reach the age of majority and exit the foster care system in the United States. They leave without a permanent family, without a home to return to after…
Teaching life skills to teenagers is something I started thinking about far too late. I had a foster teen in my home who was smart, capable, and genuinely likeable, and I noticed much later than I should have that she had no idea how to…
Every summer, youth-serving organizations across the country hire teenagers who spent the previous year as participants in their programs. A sixteen-year-old who aged out of the after-school mentoring program is now helping run the summer day camp. A high school junior who has attended your…
In May 2025, Camp Cho-Yeh in Livingston, Texas ran what most administrators would consider a thorough background screening. Before hiring a new camp counselor, the organization used a vendor to search the Enhanced Nationwide Criminal database, the Department of Justice Sex Offender Registry, Social Security…
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…
Staff turnover in youth-serving organizations runs as high as 40 percent per year. Most administrators treat this as an HR problem — a cost to manage, a vacancy to fill, a disruption to program continuity. The research says it is something more serious than that….
May is National Foster Care Month, a good time to think about how our youth organizations can help children in foster care. Not every organization is positioned to become a foster family, and we are not asking you to. But there is a wide space…