The Children's Law Podcast

The Children's Law Podcast comes from True North Child Advocates, and it treats representing children in the child welfare system as a discipline with its own hard, specific problems. Angela opens the episodes. John is a frequent second voice, with Jim or Debra joining on other occasions. The talk is aimed squarely at the practitioner: it speaks of 'your client', of the kids a lawyer is appointed to represent, of the judge who may not go along and the juvenile justice office that may not return a call. The speakers draw on years of representing children and on what they have seen in their consulting work. That experience shapes the choice of problems. One conversation lays out the broad categories of claims a child's lawyer may need to preserve, beginning with physical and sexual abuse by caregivers in group homes and foster homes, including relatives and frequent visitors who were never properly vetted. The principle offered there is blunt: believe the client first, then follow the investigation through. Another takes on the dependent child who picks up a delinquency charge. It acknowledges that practice differs state by state and county by county, and it suggests smaller overtures for lawyers with no formal structure behind them. Mental health and medication get the same plain handling. None of the speakers are clinicians, as Angela says up front, and they are clear that diagnosis is not the lawyer's job; the job is to check that everyone has done their due diligence, and to tell a diagnosis that needs treatment apart from a child who is struggling because they do not feel safe. The emotional weight of the work gets airtime too. In 'Set the Boundary or Plan the Quinceañera', the discussion turns to older youth and to whether strict, old-school boundaries might feed burnout rather than prevent it. The advice is to cross a line only with intention, after consulting others on the case, and the episode ends on a light note with a quinceañera in the offing. One episode brings in Emily Cook, a senior staff attorney at the Barton Child Law and Policy Center at Emory University School of Law, to talk about preventive legal advocacy, also called pre-petition work. That conversation weighs why keeping families out of the system is easy to support in principle and harder in practice, including the worry that attorneys arriving during an investigation could be seen as a threat to safety. Then there is 'Has America Lost Its Soul?', where the group knowingly steps onto ground some would call political, speaking about detention conditions they consider inhumane for children and separations from parents made without a shown legal necessity. It closes on a Nelson Mandela quote about a society's treatment of its children. The tone stays earnest and plainspoken throughout. Several conversations end on concrete steps: schedule a meeting, question a medication, show up for the client.