Miles gave two inspirations for the writing of "Children". One was as a response to photographs of child Yugoslav war victims that his father had brought home from a humanitarian mission in the former Yugoslavia; and the other, inspired by his career as a DJ, was to create a track to end DJ sets, intended to calm rave attendants prior to their driving home as a means to reduce car accident deaths. The song cost £150 to record.
"Children" is one of the pioneering tracks of Dream House, a genre of electronic dance music characterized by dream-like piano melodies, and a steady four-on-the-floor bass drum. The creation of dream trance was a response to social pressures in Italy during the early 1990s: the growth of rave culture among young adults, and the ensuing popularity of nightclub attendance, had created a weekly trend of deaths due to car accidents as clubbers drove across the country overnight, falling asleep at the wheel from strenuous dancing as well as alcohol and drug use. In mid-1996, deaths due to this phenomenon, called strage del sabato sera (Saturday night slaughter) in Italy, were being estimated at around 2000 since the start of the decade. The move by DJs such as Miles to play slower, calming music to conclude a night's set, as a means to counteract the fast-paced, repetitive tracks that preceded, was met with approval by authorities and parents of car crash victims.
Critic Boris Barabanov claimed a similarity between "Children" and Russian singer Garik Sukachov's song "Напои меня водой" ("Napoi menia vodoi" – "Quench my thirst"), and says the song was written before "Children". Sukachov explained that he gave his consent for the melody to be used.
Billboard ascribes the final stage of the song's promotion to the airing of its music video on music television networks such as MTV Europe and Germany's VIVA. Two videos were produced, the first being the one Billboard discusses: black-and-white footage of a small girl riding in a car through a diverse range of landscape which was directed by Matt Amos. The locations are London (Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square), Paris (The Eiffel Tower can be seen), Geneva (place du Molard, rue Coutance), Morges (marina with small towers) and countryside in Switzerland (Robert Miles's home country), and France and Italy near the Mont-Blanc Tunnel.
The second video, filmed in colour, alternates between images of Miles DJing at a nightclub rave and images of children at play, thereby touching upon both of the themes of the song.
Children received widespread universal acclaim from critics with many calling the track a masterpiece. Billboard magazine attributes the song's widespread success to its melodic nature, characterized by an "instantly recognizable" piano riff (which was not in the track's original version). They identify this factor as making the song accessible to a broader audience beyond clubbers and fans of electronic dance music alone by means of radio airplay. Synthmania.com, which identifies the song as being written on a Kurzweil K2000, calls this the "dream house piano" sound, consisting of "standard piano, syn bass and string/pad sounds bathed in delay and reverb".
The Gavin Report wrote: "In the time it takes you to listen to this song, another nation has probably taken this remarkable instrumental to the top of their chart. Name a country, and it's likely Number One there right now. And now the music of this classically trained Italian pianist/producer is set to descend on the airwaves and dance floors in the U.S.A. The melody is hypnotic."
Upon including the track on 2002's The Very Best of Euphoria compilation, TheManAdam, co-creator of the Euphoria series of trance DJ mix albums, said that the song "had a major influence on [his] generation of remixers and producers when [they] all at first started making trance".
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