I’m not a lawyer. So, when I first took this job at Children’s Law Center (CLC), I didn’t yet know how to answer this basic question: Why would a child need their own attorney?
It wasn’t until after I started this job that my mom even told me that I had my own attorney as a child, during a high-conflict custody case.
Since starting at CLC, I’ve found that the pool of youths’ legal challenges is vast, and that successfully navigating these challenges requires specialized, individualized representation. I've seen countless ways young people require legal services—from education advocacy and record clearing to navigating victimization, maltreatment, and family instability.
I’ve also seen the ways that young people fall through the cracks. This isn’t for lack of effort or care—but is too often the result of systems designed around ideal conditions that don’t hold in practice. In our ideal world, these statements are always true:
Parents protect children’s interests.
Courts ensure fairness.
Schools follow the law.
If there’s one thing I did know before starting in this role, it was that we do not live in an ideal world. When our assumptions fail, kids are the ones who suffer the consequences of our expectations. Young people frequently suffer from trauma, family disruption, and barriers to basic needs like housing and education. Until we grapple with that reality, kids will continue to fall through the cracks.
If systems are imperfect, children need safeguards that don’t rely on ideal conditions. Independent counsel for kids isn’t just nice to have—it’s an essential safeguard to protect young people’s rights, interests, health, and safety when systems aren’t working as intended.
Throughout this piece, I'll use the terms "children," "kids," and "young people" interchangeably to describe the individuals CLC serves from birth through age 25. That's intentional. While our legal systems often treat age 18 as the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, the realities of development—and the legal challenges young people face—are far more complex.
They’re Not “Just Kids:” They’re People with Rights
Two concurrent realities shape how we must understand young people’s interactions with legal systems.
First: children are not extensions of their parents. They are independent individuals with their own, enforceable rights; rights that sometimes conflict with a caregiver’s preferences. In many legal proceedings (high-conflict custody cases, for example), the child is the central figure. Without attorney representation, however, the child is often the only person in the courtroom whose voice is unheard and whose interests go unrepresented, even though the Court is expected to make a ruling “in the best interests of the child.”
The absence of direct representation for kids assumes caregivers and courts will always fully protect each child’s interests. When caregivers also fall victim to system-level assumptions, young people suffer. Addiction, abuse, mental health challenges, economic instability, and trauma can create a disconnect between what a caregiver intends and what a child requires for safety and stability. Without the child’s voice included in proceedings, the court lacks the full picture to determine what a real, best-case outcome is for the child.
Ultimately, when a child’s rights are filtered solely through attorneys for the adult caregivers or even attorneys for child protective services, a structural gap emerges. Independent legal advocacy closes that gap by recognizing the child as a distinct party within the proceeding.
Second: Legal adulthood does not equate to developmental adulthood. In the U.S., our legal system relies heavily on age-based milestones that are more akin to administrative bright-line rules than developmental reality. At 18, a young person is immediately determined to be capable of navigating contracts, courtrooms, housing agreements, and the long-term consequences of their actions.
Developmental science paints a different picture.
Impulse control, risk assessment, future planning, and susceptibility to coercion don’t fully develop until well into our mid-twenties. The law, with its presumption of adulthood at 18, assigns adult responsibilities to still-developing brains. This leaves young people more vulnerable, with less capacity for long-term consequence evaluation—and fewer legal supports to meet them in the middle.
It is worth remembering that the age of 18 is a legal milestone, not a neurological one. Recognizing this mismatch does not diminish young people’s agency, as young people deserve autonomy over their lives and decisions. Rather, it contextualizes how judgment in stressful, adversarial, or otherwise high-stakes environments takes shape in a developing brain.
Developmentally appropriate legal advocacy can account both for young people’s agency and the ways in which they continue to develop cognitive and emotional skills. It ensures legal systems are calibrated to youths’ stages of development.
When we design our legal systems around bright-line definitions instead of the realities of development, youth-centered representation becomes a necessary structural safeguard to protect young people’s rights.
Structural Vulnerabilities that Put Young People at Risk
Children interact with multiple systems every day—schools, courts, child welfare—but these youth-serving systems were not designed with youths’ needs as the central focus. Instead of creating safeguards, each assumes ideal conditions, such as those mentioned above: that caregivers will fully protect a child’s interests, that youth will understand and navigate procedures designed for adults, and that adults in authority will consistently act fairly. These assumptions often break down, leaving children vulnerable in the very places supposed to support them.
Education: Schools are governed by dense legal frameworks that students and families are expected to navigate on their own. The system relies on two significant assumptions:
Parents and/or students understand and can advocate for children’s educational rights, especially related to school discipline, special education, and accommodations.
Public schools have the resources and capacity to consistently provide proper supports to every child.
In practice, language barriers, limited access to information, understaffing, and underfunding can make those assumptions difficult to sustain. When these failures occur, students face exclusion from learning, inequitable discipline, and missed educational supports. Youth-centered legal advocacy helps students secure accommodations, enforce disability rights, and remain connected to school.
Child Welfare and Custody: Child welfare systems are designed to protect children, but they rely on assumptions that caregivers always have capacity to meet their children’s needs, right when those needs arise—and too often, we forget that caregivers face their own barriers to accessing basic needs. In practice, families face trauma, substance use, mental health challenges, and instability that complicate these assumptions.
When that gap between intention, capacity, and practical challenges surfaces, a custody dispute may pit a child’s needs against a caregiver’s capacity to meet them. Without independent representation, the child’s perspective can be lost entirely in this complex reality. Youth-centered attorneys ensure that children’s voices are heard, that their safety and wellbeing are prioritized, and that decisions reflect the child as an independent rights-holder rather than an extension of their parents. This looks like a young person who wants to maintain contact during a parent’s recovery—and an attorney who advocates for that to happen in safe, healthy ways.
Justice System: Young people encounter justice systems as victims, witnesses, or defendants. It is not yet consistent, though, that these systems are calibrated to youths’ stages of development. Even in systems built “for” kids, like juvenile court, there may still be adults in the room who lack understanding of how children think, process trauma, or weigh consequences. The line at 18 can be as harsh as it can be flexible, often to the detriment of the child: a young adult can be navigating fully adult court systems just months after aging out of youth-specific services, and in some cases, minors are legally reclassified as adults within that same system.
For example, youth under or over 18 may be expected to navigate plea agreements, testify under cross-examination, or face adult sentencing procedures, despite limited impulse control, developing risk assessment skills, and heightened vulnerability to retraumatization.
The challenge isn’t simply that the law draws the line at 18. It’s that our systems apply concepts of childhood and adulthood inconsistently, often stretching or shrinking them based on media and political narratives rather than developmental realities. Depending on the local, state, and federal administrations, the same court may transfer youth to adult court more readily in one cycle and maintain reliance on juvenile courts in the next. Youth-centered legal advocacy helps navigate these inconsistencies, translating complex legal processes, protecting rights, and ensuring decisions are grounded in developmental context.
Emerging Adulthood: Once a young person reaches 18, legal systems assume they can independently manage housing, employment, healthcare, and financial obligations. Yet young adults continue to rely on support while still developing executive functioning, long-term planning, and judgment under stress.
Eviction notices, healthcare decisions, and employment barriers can escalate quickly, leaving young people vulnerable. This is exacerbated for young people who are transitioning from out-of-home placements, such as detention or foster care—or for youth who have already experienced housing insecurity. Attorneys focused on emerging adults help navigate these high-stakes transitions, safeguard legal rights, and connect youth to resources that support stability and growth, through record sealing, housing advocacy, eviction mitigation, and related supports.
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Across systems, the pattern is consistent: when assumptions about protection, capacity, and fairness break down, young people are left to navigate complex legal environments without the resources or authority to protect themselves. Independent legal advocacy is what transforms those gaps into enforceable protections.
Conclusion
So why does a child need an attorney? Three years ago, I couldn’t have clearly answered this question or explained the role youth-centered advocacy plays across systems. Today, I can—because I’ve seen, over the past 1,000 days, what it means for a child to have someone whose sole responsibility is to protect their interests.
When parents, schools, and the criminal justice system fall short in their obligations to protect children, youth-centered legal advocacy has the power to change the outcome. When children have their needs, including legal representation, met, we create the conditions for resilience to translate into stability, safety, and opportunity.
This belief is what drives CLC's work across Ohio and Kentucky, where hundreds of young people each year receive free legal representation in schools, courts, and child welfare proceedings.
Children need their own attorneys for the same reason adults do: because rights are only meaningful when someone is empowered to protect them.
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Author: Sydney Pepper Ballachino, CLC Director of Advancement