Designing instruments for children and youth that result in reliable and valid data requires consideration beyond calculating grade-level equivalence of the text. Very little methodological research has been conducted on the survey response processes of children and youth and there are no comprehensive guidelines informing instrument development for this population. This paper reviews and integrates theories from the fields of cognitive, developmental, and educational psychology, as well as survey methodology, to consider how children's cognitive, language/reading, and social/moral development impacts their progression through the four stages (comprehension, retrieval, judgment, and reporting) of the survey response model. Based on this review, a set of theoretically-based recommendations is proposed for designing or adapting instruments for children and youth that are 9 to 18 years old. These recommendations aim to minimize developmentally-related measurement errors within each stage of the response process.