In Consenting Children: Autonomy, Responsibility, Well-Being. London: Proceedings of the British Academy. 2025Children occupy a curious place in our moral and legal practices, including in our consent practices. It is widely believed that differential treatment of children, often in the form of paternalistic non- consensual interference, is permitted in many cases, including in cases where children have similar capacities for autonomous action as competent adults. We take children’s consent not to be necessary for a range of actions that parents and other adults undertake in their regard. We also often take children’s consent not to be a sufficient justification for action when it would suffice for comparably autonomous adults. Consent is usually taken to affect our duties and how we may act towards the person giving consent, but consent given by children often does not seem to do so in the same way or to the same degree. Why is this? This chapter explores how children’s consent can in some sense be ineffective in terms of guiding consent- receivers’ behaviour, using the legal ‘concurrent consents doctrine’— which allows for children’s consent to be supplanted by the consent of parents and courts— as its focus. I argue against views that hold that the way children’s consent is sometimes ineffective in changing our duties is best explained by children’s consent being invalid due to deficiencies in the consent-giver. These accounts fail because other parties’ powers to consent to interventions that are contrary to children’s welfare interests are also constrained, in the same way children’s consent is constrained under the concurrent consents doctrine. When children’s consent is ineffective, this fact is better explained by views that focus on how concern for children’s well- being structures our duties, such that they are less consent- sensitive. The first section sets out the concurrent consents doctrine and explains how children’s consent may be deprived of the effect consent is typically taken to have in English law. The second section considers views on which children’s consent is ineffective in altering the duties and behaviour of consent- receivers because children’s consent is defective on grounds of invalidity. The third section elaborates consent’s role in guiding our reasons for action. The fourth section considers views on which consent is ineffective because its scope is constrained. The final section considers how our duties to children affect the effectiveness of their consent.