Disaster management has been dominated by top-down relief efforts targeted at adults, who are assumed to be attuned to the needs of their families and the wider community, and to act harmoniously to protect their immediate and longterm interests. Whilst a growing number of development approaches focus on reducing the risk of disasters, they tend to treat children as passive victims with a limited role to play in communicating risks or preventing and responding to disasters. This paper challenges these assumptions by examining how children’s voices are represented and heard in disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy and decision-making spaces, and by assessing the level of capacity children have for preventing disasters vis-à-vis their parents. This challenge and the research presented here are prompted by the anecdotal field reports provided by child-focused development agencies, which suggest that children in developing countries are making significant contributions to minimising disaster risks. Through this lens, the paper explores three linked areas of enquiry that help to frame the emerging ‘child-centred approach to DRR’. First, it considers a history of youth empowerment through children’s active participation in decision-making forums. Second, it looks at whether the international human rights architecture provides for a child’s right to protection from disasters; and third, it asks whether children can be effective as communicators of risk within their own households and communities. These three elements contextualise the results of field research in El Salvador and the Philippines, which explored what opportunities exist for the voices of children and their groups to be heard within local and national DRR policy spaces and the experiences and capacity they have for doing so. The concluding section considers why children may be suited to the role as DRR advocates and as communicators of disaster risk, and indeed, whether this is desirable, before raising a number of further questions emerging from this research.