Balance impairments are common in cerebral palsy (CP), but we know surprisingly little about the underlying alterations in control of reactive balance. We hypothesized that children with CP will use similar feedback control pathways as healthy children, but with increased sensitivity, leading to balance impairments. We tested 6 levels of backward translations in both healthy children and children with CP to compare muscle activity and feedback control pathways. Children with CP were less successful than healthy children in recovering from a perturbation without stepping and when successful, their response was stiffer. In both children with CP and healthy children, reactive muscle activity could be explained by delayed center of mass feedback, yet sensitivities were higher in in children with CP. In the future, we will explore whether these alterations in reactive balance control are related to the level of spasticity.