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.
Suppose one of your kids takes forty dollars from your purse and lies about it for a week. You forgive him quickly. What you shouldn’t do is leave your purse open on the counter again. Global Forgiveness Day fell last week on July 7, and every...
Debbie Ausburn · July 14, 2026
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Research on overparenting is giving youth administrators a useful tool: peer-reviewed evidence that age-appropriate independence is not a supervision gap. It is good program design. Understanding that research, and its limits, can help you push back on parent pressure, defend your supervision policies, and build…
This week, Americans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is easy to treat July 4th as a celebration of a single dramatic moment, a group of men signing a document and changing history. But the more instructive story is what happened…
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, had no idea how it would go. They were committing to a revolution whose outcome was genuinely uncertain. They could see what they were fighting for. They could not see whether it would…
Most youth-serving organizations have a supervision policy. Far fewer have a supervision system — a structure that actually generates information about what staff are doing, gets that information to someone with authority to act on it, and creates a record of what the organization did in response….
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…
Tom Rawlings and I recorded a six-part podcast series for YSO Academy, and all six episodes are now available. The series is called “Cultivating a Culture of Safety,” and it walks through the full arc of building a child protection program from the ground up….
I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to figure out what my foster children were doing wrong, and what I was doing wrong, before I started asking a different question. The question wasn’t why they were behaving badly. It was why their…
June 26 is PTSD Awareness Day, but your legal obligations extend well beyond PTSD. When a child with any mental health diagnosis enrolls in your program and you see associated behavioral problems, the ADA governs what your organization must do next. It sets specific rules…
Recent revelations that a Maine US Senate candidate had an account on Kik, described by NBC as a “notorious chat app,” once again highlight the need for adults to protect children from the very real dangers of social media. In particular, Kik —where users can chat anonymously…
Juneteenth is one of those holidays I am never quite sure how to honor. On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and told the last remaining enslaved people that the war was over and they were free. It was a remarkable moment…
Monday’s post covered what the research says about stress tolerance in children: that it is a learnable capacity, that adult relationships are the primary buffer between tolerable and toxic stress, and that youth programs directly influence the conditions that build it. This post covers what…
May I remind you—–it’s okay! Whatever it is that you are feeling, thinking, fearing, hating, or loving I want to offer you a reassurance in the fight towards resilience by saying–it is okay! We all need to hear this. May we all read it, speak it,…