One area that youth organizations must address is how to accommodate children with disabilities. It can be a complicated question, such as when a child’s disability harms other children or when a disability simply cannot be accommodated without completely changing your program. Even programs with the best intentions must balance and care for the needs…

In general, youth programs must make “reasonable modifications” to their programs to accommodate a child’s disability, but there are exceptions. How the rule and exceptions play out depend entirely on the specifics of your program and a child’s disability. You will have to assess each situation individually. Two cases — chronic illness and communicable illness…

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 it is impossible to isolate foster care as the only variable. As in many studies of…