childbestinterest.eu Launches to Challenge the Adult Bias Shaping Decisions About Children

Over 14% of children globally face mental health challenges. A new European platform says the system is failing them – and names why.

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC, August 15, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Every day, adults make decisions about children. In courtrooms, classrooms, hospitals, and around kitchen tables – adults assess, debate, and determine what is best for the child in front of them. This is necessary. Children need adults to decide for them.

What is almost never acknowledged is that no adult does this without bias. Every parent, professional, or judge acting in a child’s best interests also brings their own history, their own conflict, their own version of events. The child’s interests and the adult’s agenda are never fully separate. The system, in its current form, does not account for that.

“Adults are not neutral – they never are,” says Lucie Straková, child and teen coach, founder of kidscoach.cz and international youth program kiDay, and active transitional foster parent in the Czech Republic. “The child’s best interest gets filtered through everything the adult is carrying, without anyone acknowledging that is happening.”

It is why, this month, she is launching childbestinterest.eu – a platform dedicated to one idea: that the best interests of the child must be separated from the agendas, conflicts, and blind spots of the adults claiming to act on them.

The platform launches into a moment of acute global concern. The KidsRights Index 2025 – the only annual global ranking measuring how children’s rights are respected worldwide – reports that over 14% of children and adolescents aged 10–19 globally are currently experiencing mental health concerns, with suicide now the third leading cause of death among young people aged 15–29. The ESPAD 2024 survey found that more than one in four European adolescents report low life satisfaction. UNICEF describes the current generation as facing an “epidemic of disconnection,” driven by loneliness, academic pressure, and digital overexposure.

“These numbers are not abstract to me,” says Straková. “They are the children I sit with every week. What they tell me, consistently, is that the adults in their lives are busy – managing their own fear, their own conflict, their own schedules. The child’s experience is organized around all of that. What the child actually needs is treated as something to address once the adult problems are sorted.”

childbestinterest.eu publishes commentary, analysis, and resources on children’s rights in everyday life – in families, schools, healthcare, courts, and the systems that claim to serve young people. Content is published in English for an international audience of parents, educators, advocates, and policymakers.

“I am not launching a news site,” says Straková. “I am launching a perspective. A child’s right to be heard is not a courtesy extended when the adults have finished talking. It is a right. And it is being quietly ignored every day.”

childbestinterest.eu is now live.

About Lucie Straková
Lucie Straková is a child and teen coach, founder of kidscoach.cz and kiDay, and a children’s rights advocate with over twenty years of direct experience. She is a transitional foster parent in the Czech Republic and is completing a Master’s in psychology. She works internationally, in English.

Lucie Strakova
kiDay
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Written By: EIN Presswire