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In the early 1990s, soon after Israel had ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Israeli Supreme Court issued several rulings that focused on the issue of children's rights, which would now be addressed as a fundamentally new doctrine. Presented as reflecting a significant change in the attitude of the case law, this doctrine was ascribed to the ratification of the Convention and to the enactment in 1992 of Israel's Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. In this article, I argue that the recognition of children as rights bearers is not new and that signs of it are evident in the Court's case law dating back to the early years of Israel's existence. The development of the case law, however, has not been linear. In this article, I analyze the spiral progression of this process and suggest explanations for the particular course that Israeli case law has taken with regard to the recognition of children's rights.