Blog: Other People's Children®

Join me and my friend Rhonda Sciortino as we talk on her podcast, Empowering Resilience, about the lessons I've learned and recounted in my new book, Raising Other People's Children...

One common dilemma for stepparents is how to handle rules when your child lives with his/her other parent most of the time. How do you handle being only a weekend parent? My experiences as a foster parent taught me a few important...

I was happy to see this article about my friend, Gaile Osborne, and her work for a foster parents' Bill of Rights in North Carolina. Relatively few states give foster parents any status in the system. Most jurisdictions treat foster parents as...

Jason Palmer is fascinating and experienced, and I had a great time comparing notes with him...

I had a great conversation with Summer Mulder on the Everything Always podcast about blended families and my new...

As we head to the end of the school year, many of us start thinking about a family vacation. Our family loves to travel, and we have always taken a collection of younger relatives and friends along with us. Here are some techniques that we have learned over the...

I had a great time talking to Dionne Sanchez with Words of Heart...

This time of year is always busy, with the end of school and trying to plan for the summer. This year we have the added stress of navigating the ever-changing and contradictory advice about recovering from the pandemic lockdown...

One of the questions that I often hear is how the community can help foster children and foster parents. My immediate answer is to consider becoming a respite care provider. Those families provide care to a foster child for only a few days

The foundation of raising other people's children is being able to make a one-way commitment to a new family and to children who may or may not like you.

It’s every foster parent’s nightmare — being accused of abusing a foster child. I read a story this week of one happy ending after new medical evidence cleared a foster mother of breaking a 6-week-old baby’s leg. I understand her...

We have all heard the fairytale stereotypes about evil stepparents. The common expert explanation was that parents have a natural evolutionary tendency to favor their biological children over stepchildren. An interesting new study...

Teenagers generally are the toughest audience for a stepparent or foster parent. Younger children are at a developmental stage where they are more likely to want a relationship with you and will accept you more readily.

One common problem with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day that I don’t see discussed often is what to in complex stepfamilies where different sets of siblings have different biological parents. The usual result is that one set of...

Today is National Foster Care Day, the first Tuesday in National Foster Care Month. It also is always a week or two before Mother’s Day. This year, because of the way the days landed on the calendar, the two events are only a few...

When raising other people’s children, it’s easy to start hating Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. It’s a bit like being single on Valentine’s Day. All of the attention goes to biological parents, and foster parents or stepparents are left on their own...

It’s time to start planning ahead for Mothers’ Day (May 9) and Fathers’ Day (June 20). Those days are always difficult ones for those of us raising other people’s children. Even if we want to ignore both days as mere “greeting card”...

In my quest to find good anti-bullying programs, I ran across a survey analysis concluding that family resilience factors may help. We know from other studies that if our children have suffered numerous Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), they also have a high...

As I’ve noted before, helping our children avoid bullying is a complicated question. Sometimes, what our children face is not bullying, but just plain old conflict that our children need to learn how to face. Negative feedback is a normal part...

In continued honor of National Siblings Day, I want to talk for a bit about one of the biggest losses that our foster children face, which is losing track of their siblings. It is hard to find statistics, but I have seen estimates that anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of...

I am late recognizing that Saturday, April 10, was National Siblings Day. It reminded me that one of the most difficult parts of blending families is helping our kids get along with each other. I didn’t have biological children when I married...

I had a great conversation with Shelley Tyson on her podcast, Cultivate Legacy, and you can hear it here. We talked about the similarities between foster parenting and step-parenting, and my stories of lessons learned in my upcoming book, Raising Other People's Children.

“My mom doesn’t make me do that!” We’ve all heard it. Our child’s biological parent has different rules, and our child likes those rules better than ours. It is very easy to get into a battle of wills or to criticize their parents’ rules. Those...

Being a foster parent or stepparent can be a complicated task and there are few simple and easy solutions to the challenges we face. Several years ago, however, I stumbled across a simple technique that transformed my approach...

I had a great time talking to Jen Rogers on her podcast, Blended on the Bluff...

As parents deal with the effects of various lockdowns on our children, we need to consider whether we can harness the power of the Americans with Disabilities Act to help them as they return to school, camps, and youth organizations...

I ran across an outstanding article that describes how children can form actual, real memories of things that they never witnessed. In this article, the memories were benign and positive (activities with a deceased grandfather), but the...

It’s Tolkien Reading Day, set for today because in The Lord of the Rings, the heroes managed to overthrow the villain on March 25. In allowing his characters to triumph, however, Tolkien underscores another continuing theme in his books...

This week we celebrate Tolkien Reading Day. I have been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work since I discovered it in college. I started The Lord of the Rings, like many projects, because the guy I was infatuated with at the time liked the book...

The pandemic and ill-advised school lockdowns have taken a toll on our children, and another survey adds more detail to what we know. The University of Michigan recently conducted a survey of parents nationwide, who reported significant...

In this series, I’ve talked about how our commitments to our children have to be strong and one-way. It is easy to conflate that truth into believing that we must unconditionally commit to our children. In reality, no emotionally healthy...

In this series, we’ve talked about the importance of making strong commitments to our children, and that we have to be willing to make one-way commitments. However, one-way does not mean unlimited. Each of us has different skill sets...

I was really irritated. It had been a long day, my foster daughter had pitched a fit because I wouldn’t take her shopping, and now my dog was missing. I knew the dog was inside the house, just as I knew that I had been right in the...

One night shortly after my marriage, I went to tell my new stepson good night. During the conversation, he asked, “Debbie, when you and Dad split up…”. I interrupted him to say that we wouldn’t be spitting up. “OK,” he resumed...

I recently found an article about an intriguing study at Emory University finding that children who knew more about their family history show higher levels of well-being. I cannot locate the original 2010 study, and while I have found related...

This post is the last (for now) in a series about how we can be the mentor in our blended families’ stories rather than the evil stepparent. If we can start displaying some of these characteristics, we will have a better shot at developing a...

In my last post, I discussed how children think in narratives, and how the only slots available for us as stepparents or foster parents are either the villain or the mentor in their story. In this and my next post, I want to look at more...

One of the hardest parts of raising non-biological children is fitting into their narrative. Humans are story-telling animals. For thousands of years, we have used stories to teach, learn, and make sense of our reality. Our children have done...

As we move toward Valentine’s Day, it is a good time to remember the importance of keeping all of our commitments in balance. It is easy as parents to make our children our only focus, and to forget that those commitments are not the...

This week before Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember why those of us with bonus children need to make our marriages our top priority -- even more of a priority than our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our...

Another major factor in helping children develop resilience is helping them make connections with other people. We are social animals and are hardwired to be part of a community. Many studies have noted the importance of support...

As rates of depression and anxiety skyrocket during the pandemic, helping our children develop resilience is more important than ever. Putting external guardrails in place is important in preventing suicide, but the only long-term...

The New York Times has published an outstanding article about the increase in student suicides during the pandemic. Although it is impossible to definitively link the increase to locked-down schools, there is a very strong correlation...

A recent study from Sweden raises serious questions about how foster care impacts children. Most studies of the foster system suffer from the problem that children placed in foster care are unlike non-placed children in so many ways that...

One of the hardest balancing acts in building a new family is setting healthy boundaries. We know that vibrant relationships require some level of self-sacrifice, but if we sacrifice too much of ourselves the relationships become...

According to the Internet, January 17 is “Ditch Your New Year’s Resolutions Day.” I have no idea who created the day or why. But it’s on the Internet, so it must be true. Because I like the one resolution I made this year (to be more boring)...

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...

In my last post, I discussed some ways to meet the challenges that blended families face during the holidays. If you are a foster parent, you will face the same challenges, only more so. With step-children, they are with at least one of their...

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...

Perhaps because today is World Suicide Prevention Day, I have seen a lot of articles and blog posts this week advising parents how to take care of their children. Having parented depressed and suicidal children, I know how overwhelming...

This is National Suicide Prevention Week, and this year it comes amid reports of increased suicides and depression during the pandemic. If you are parenting a child who is struggling with anxiety and depression, you may hear your...

One struggle we all face, but especially when parenting traumatized children, is where to find the strength to keep going. Sometimes the problems our children face can seem insurmountable. The sheer magnitude of the damage they have...

I am hearing more and more stories from parents about rising anxiety and depression in our children. Most of the reports are anecdotal, but many of us seem to have children struggling with these effects of the coronavirus restrictions.

Coronavirus measures put our children at greater risk of cyberbulllying

Numerous mental health studies suggest that one of the best ways to help children develop resilience and recover...

For those of us who have traumatized children in our care, it is difficult to know how to help them. A recent study from...

One topic that I have been pondering lately is how families manage adversity and teach their children to be resilient...

A pattern that shows up very often in studies of resilience is a high correlation between resilience and self-esteem...

One of the most important, and difficult, ways that we can encourage resilience in children is to allow them...

One of the better trends in the last decade of caring for children is the recognition that children need to develop...

In my last post, I discussed the 20+ years of research on the possible effects of adverse childhood experiences...

One of the most active areas of mental health studies these days is the effect of adverse childhood experience...

A recent analysis of a national survey indicates that families can help children avoid bullying by developing habits of...

Bullying issues get a lot of attention these days, because everyone wants to spare children the trauma of true bullying...

In our zeal to protect children from trauma, we risk creating more anxiety by protecting them too much...

Two recently-published studies claim that mindfulness training can help children cope with stress in school...

An interesting study from the Yale Child Study Center that works with parents instead of their children is being hailed...