Drawing upon a Swedish study of vulnerable children as social actors in family law proceedings this paper explores how children themselves approach and negotiate the issue of participation. The discussion is based upon thematically structured interviews with children whose father has been violent to their mother and who have met with social workers in the context of a legal dispute about custody, residence or contact. The analysis reconstructs how these children have dealt with encounters with social workers and to what extent they used the space for action they perceived that they had. What children are doing in this situation – that they all are somehow prepared for– can be seen as intentional at least to some extent. Therefore the concept of strategy seems appropriate: actions and non-action are chosen for a purpose. Children’s strategies are outlined and it is discussed how different child strategies may be linked to children’s perspectives on participation expressed in these interviews, and what these links between children’s perspectives and their strategies can tell us about children’s participation in the context of a difficult life situation.