Written companion pieces to the channel — sourced readings of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF's AI guidance, and real cases where automated systems have already shaped decisions about children.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UNICEF's guidance, and the other source texts this series works through — read the way a practitioner reads them. New documents are added as the series continues.
Ratified by 196 countries, undefined in the text itself. What that openness does when it meets an overworked system — and what happens when it gets written into an algorithm's objective function.
The Convention assumes a child is present for decisions about their own life. In 20 years, I've watched that presence get replaced by a paragraph, written by someone else, days before the hearing.
Separation is supposed to be a last resort with an ongoing, reviewed relationship on the other side of it. What I've actually watched happen once the file closes.
Protection, provision, participation — a genuinely serious framework for AI and children. And, by its own admission, a request to governments with no enforcement mechanism attached.
AI, algorithms, and what the evidence so far shows about their role in decisions affecting children.
The Dutch childcare benefits scandal: a fraud-detection algorithm, thousands of wrongly flagged families, and over a thousand children taken into care — for a decision no child was ever the direct target of.
The "empathy gap," a lawsuit, a Harvard study naming a pattern of emotional manipulation in companion apps — and what 20 years with children who have real attachment wounds adds to the research.
A practitioner's view from inside the system: foster care, courts, and the time children spend waiting. Czechia is the case study; the questions apply anywhere.
The best interests standard asks what outcome is best for a child, and almost never when. Why time belongs inside the standard, with Czechia as a case study of a reform that sets a deadline for only one stage.
Joint decision-making stops one parent pushing the other out. It can also let either parent veto help a child needs, and in high conflict the child lives inside the dispute.
A seven-month-old, a petition with no hearing date, and a region that searches for adopters only after the judgment is final. What changes when the steps to a permanent family run in parallel.
The foster carer sees the child's whole day and has the least say; each institution sees one piece. Who is accountable for the whole child, and what holding it together could mean.