One rather interesting aspect of child soldiers that tends to get overlooked is child riggers.
I recently saw on the news a report about an air show in Tallahassee Florida which included a group called the Young Eagles which, apparently, teaches children how to operate World War II combat aircraft, among other things. One thing that really struck me about the report was a short video chip which clearly showed a young girl, around eight years old, sitting behind a door-mounted .50 machine gun and casually playing with it. I honestly don't know if it was loaded o rnot.
Now, in this day and age, war is becoming more like a video game and video games are becoming more like the real thing. In fact, the people who are designing new interfaces for military weapons systems are attempting to make them as video-game-like as possible to harness skills that most recruits will already have which will reduce overall training time and cost.
In 2070, there literally is no difference between flying a drone plane in a VR game and flying a drone plane in real life. The 8-year-old suburban girl who spends several hours playing Microdeck Flight Simulator XXXXX after school every day can, in fact, be a superior combat pilot compared to the academy-graduate officer you spend millions of nuyen training and probably is.
Competitive video game players who specialize in vehicle-based games can and will outperform high trained elite military personnel on the battlefield after a certain point. A kid controlling a drone vehicle fighting in Desert Wars from the comfort of an upper-middle-class suburban living room faces no more danger or discomfort than she would controlling a virtual vehicle in the same circumstances, with the possible exception of being captured or killed by shdowrunners if she's too good.
Giving exceptionally skilled video gamers a chance to participate in desert wars, regardless of age, is a win-win for the corporations. It is free advertising, it makes them hip with the young demographics, and there is absolutely no real danger for parents groups to complain about. Even the violence would be no different from that seen in a regular VR game.
Kill from your couch, they could call it.