News

Lunch & Learn Tuesday, June 23, 2026, Voice of the Child Interviews and Child-Inclusive Practice: Interviewing Skill, Role Clarity, and Professional Safeguards

Lunch & Learn Tuesday, June 23, 2026, Voice of the Child Interviews and Child-Inclusive Practice: Interviewing Skill, Role Clarity, and Professional Safeguards
Via Zoom at 12pm - link will be sent to registrants (see registration below) prior to the session

As child-inclusive approaches continue to expand within family mediation, professionals are increasingly required to consider how children’s perspectives are gathered, for what purpose, and with what safeguards. This webinar provides an education-focused overview of Voice of the Child (VOC) interviews, evidence-informed child interviewing principles, and the importance of role clarity when incorporating children’s perspectives into mediation and dispute resolution processes.

The session explores how children communicate, how adult questioning can unintentionally influence responses, and why interviewing skill, structured process, and professional oversight matter when children are involved. It also examines how different professionals such as mediators, lawyers, and neutral interviewers may appropriately engage with children in different ways, while emphasizing that these approaches serve distinct purposes and should not be treated as interchangeable.

Recognizing that child-inclusive practices vary across jurisdictions and professional settings, the webinar does not assume a single prevailing model. Instead, it invites reflective consideration of current formats used to access children’s views, and how professional safeguards such as peer review and clear confidentiality boundaries support ethical, neutral, and developmentally appropriate practice.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
1. Understand the purpose, scope, and limits of Voice of the Child interviews within family dispute resolution.
2. Distinguish between neutral child-inclusive interviewing and advocacy-based instruction-taking.
3. Identify core child interviewing principles that protect neutrality, accuracy, and child wellbeing.
4. Recognize how developmental factors, memory, and language affect children’s responses.
5. Understand the role of peer review and professional oversight in maintaining quality and accountability in child interviewing.
6. Reflect on confidentiality and secret-keeping considerations when children’s perspectives are gathered for different professional purposes.

Key Topics

• Voice of the Child interviews: purpose, scope, and boundaries
• Child development and communication in interviewing contexts
• Neutrality, suggestibility, and unintended influence
• Different roles, different questions, different purposes
• Instruction-taking as legal advocacy and how this differs from a VOC process
• Professional safeguards in child interviewing, including peer review
• Confidentiality, secret-keeping, and role-specific safeguards in child-inclusive work
• child inclusive mediation triage
• child interview checklist
• Alberta and what’s happening here

Illustrative Practice Example (Process Overview)

To support applied understanding, the webinar will briefly describe one example of how Voice of the Child principles can be operationalized in practice. This includes a structured, developmentally appropriate interview focused on a child’s lived experience rather than outcomes, clear role separation between neutral information-gathering and advocacy, safeguards to minimize suggestibility or pressure, and the use of peer review as a quality assurance measure. This overview is provided for illustrative purposes only, to demonstrate how best-practice principles may be translated into process rather than to promote any specific service model.

Key Clarification

The webinar clarifies that when a child provides instructions to their lawyer regarding outcomes or positions to be argued, that information is gathered for legal advocacy purposes within a solicitor-client relationship. While this may be appropriate legal representation, it is not a Voice of the Child (VOC) process. Voice of the Child interviews do not ask children to identify, prioritize, or defend outcomes, and do not place children in a decision-making role.

These approaches are not better or worse than one another; they simply answer different questions. In practice, they may also be complementary. For example, a child representation lawyer may choose to incorporate or rely on a neutral VOC report as part of their advocacy, alongside client instructions, to ensure that the child’s lived experience is accurately and proportionately reflected. Clarity about the purpose, method, and role of each form of child input is essential when information is shared or relied upon outside its original context.

The webinar will also include a short outline of the services offered by Clear Voice Interview Services.

Presenter Biographies

Matt Linzer, RSW, and Kim Burke, CYC are court-qualified subject matter experts in child interviewing and co-founders of Clear Voice Interview Services Inc., a firm specializing in Voice of the Child interviews. Collectively, they have conducted over 5,500 court-informed child interviews and bring more than 20 years of combined experience in specialized child forensic interviewing roles, along with 45 years of combined service within Child and Family Services (CFS).

Both presenters previously held specialized interviewing positions at the Zebra Child & Youth Advocacy Centre, working within multidisciplinary and court-informed environments involving complex, high-conflict matters. They also served as regional lead investigators for Practice Note 5 (PN5) reports, providing oversight and expertise in matters requiring advanced interviewing skill and court-ready analysis. Their work emphasizes developmentally appropriate practice, neutrality, and professional safeguards that protect children from undue influence or pressure, and they are regularly relied upon for their expertise in interviewing standards, professional oversight, and best practices for incorporating children’s perspectives into adult decision-making processes.

Professional Education Statement

This webinar is provided for professional education and reflective practice purposes only. It does not promote or advertise any private service, product, or organization. The content is intended to support mediator competence, ethical awareness, and informed child-inclusive practice across jurisdictions.

AFMS Lunch & Learns are free for current members, please register here: AFMS Lunch & Learn registration form
Sessions are recorded and available on the AFMS website for members at any time.