Youth protection law is an understudied sub-discipline of family law in academic legal circles. However, an analysis of the objectives of the Quebec Youth Protection Act shows that the clinical foundations of the Act come into conflict with the more rigid framework of the legal world. By adopting a relational perspective, which explains the new direction taken by the Act since its modification in 2006, the author of the present article seeks to demonstrate that several characteristics of the adversarial system are incoherent with the new view of the child and individual, as defined in the Act.