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Why did youth move from their trans-Himalayan villages at very young ages to attend school with the risk of prolonged family separation? An in-depth study of youth from rural trans-Himalayan villages who travelled to Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, to live and study at a (free) boarding school, funded by both national and international donors, provides a starting point to address this question. The “People’s War” from 1996 to 2006 in Nepal contextualizes the study, given that the Maoist insurgency in the Himalayan hinterland aimed to recruit youth to the rebel cause. The study of youth from the trans-Himalayan region living at the boarding school as students was conducted between April and July 2014 in Kathmandu. The youth arrived at the school between the ages of four and ten years, and did not see their families for several years after their arrival, given the significant distances between their villages and the associated costs of travel. Drawing on scholarship in children’s geographies, the narratives of these youth are employed to underscore their agency in these biographies of migration and better understand these difficult separations during political uncertainty and civil war.

Children’s Geographies actively engages with critical understandings of age‐based research. However, the concept of age is an uncritical entity in these studies fueled by western concepts of childhood. Demarcating age numerically runs the risk of measuring childhoods in the Majority Worlds with Minority World concepts that are not culturally sensitive, but also forecloses any innovations. Researchers often spend so long debating definitions and boundaries when it is often in the grey areas of scholarship and life that the most exciting events and outcomes occur. This review begins with navigating ‘grey areas of age’ from how it is often measured in spaces of conceptual ambiguity with regards to experiences of being in between formal definitions of childhood or ‘Children’s Geographies.’ This is elaborated upon from Eurocentric linages that have shaped the subfield of Children’s Geographies, and in which the subfield should continue shifting from to further decolonize Eurocentric research related to age and childhood. The paper ends by presenting ways of further advancing the subfield of Children’s Geographies through (inter)generational positioning concepts and new interdisciplinary life course studies that further nuances the social variable of age as a grey area in the subfield.

During certain crises, displacement of populations seeking safe refuge elsewhere can occur without the certainty of a return, if at all. Children and young people in such contexts often face the additional challenge of restrictions or disregard towards engaging their agency in migration decision-making processes. Through 60 in-depth interviews with 30 trans-Himalayan participants (ages of 16–23) and multi-sited ethnography throughout Nepal, this paper investigates multiple experiences of crises experienced by young people and the effects on their life course trajectories. From focusing on the Civil War in 1996–2006, the 2015 earthquake, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper proposes that initial displacements from the Civil War, when connected with other crises later on in a participant’s life course, better prepared them to deal with crises and enabled them to create a landscape of resilience. Furthermore, a landscape of resilience that connects past and present life course experiences during crises prepared some participants for helping their larger communities alleviate certain crises-related tension. Overall, this paper extends analysis on an under-researched group of young migrants by connecting crises that shaped their (im)mobility and life trajectories, rather than approaching crises as singular, isolated experiences.