Professor Penney Lewis:

The reasons there are so few cases involving adolescents in the Netherlands and Belgium, even though the Dutch law has been open to adolescents since 2002, is that terminally ill children tend to want to live as long as possible because they are worried about their parents. They tend not to go down that road because their main concern is what will happen to their parents after they die? Will they be very sad? Will they be able to cope? Explanations such as that help to explain the very small number of cases.