Twenty years in the room, then a decision to go back to school

I fell into this field the way a lot of people do — through a summer job, then another summer, then a coaching relationship that turned into a calling before I'd made any conscious decision about it.

My name is Lucie Straková. For over twenty years I've worked with kids, teens, and young adults — running youth programs, fifteen summers on Leadership staff at American summer camps (including as Waterfront Director and Teen Trips Leader), coaching families through divorce and custody disputes, and for the last several years, as a transitional foster carer myself. Some of that work has been with children in real crisis. Much more of it has simply been the everyday work of showing up for young people.

I'm a certified American Red Cross Lifeguarding and First Aid/CPR Instructor. I founded kiDay, which connects Central European children with international summer camp experiences, and the kiDay Foundation alongside it. I spent years doing this work at a professional distance before I did it personally — the shift to fostering came from watching, year after year, how much of what a struggling child actually needs isn't a program or a session, but a stable adult who shows up on the ordinary Tuesday when nothing is happening.

I'm also, right now, finishing a postgraduate psychology degree — pursued deliberately in parallel with this project, not before it. The honest order of events is backwards from what you'd expect: I met hundreds of children first, in real rooms, and I'm only now going back to find out what the academic field has to say about what I already watched happen. I'd rather show that process honestly, mistakes and surprises included, than present a finished framework I don't actually have yet.

Why "Best Interest"

Every legal document about children — every custody ruling, every care order, every child protection report — uses the same phrase: the best interest of the child. It's the standard set out in Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by 196 countries. In twenty years, I have never once heard anyone give a straight, consistent definition of what it actually means in practice — and I've watched the exact same phrase justify opposite decisions in nearly identical cases.

Best Interest, the channel and this site, is where I put twenty years of watching that phrase do its work — good and bad — next to the actual source documents, and next to what's now happening as parts of that decision get handed to algorithms that have never sat in a room with a child.

Meet Texas

Texas is an Alapaha Blue Blood Bulldog who sits in on more coaching sessions than most licensed therapists will in a career. Children who won't speak to me for three sessions straight will lean over and start talking to him immediately, no prompting. He shows up regularly on the channel, usually about to fall asleep on someone's foot.