As child migration has caught the attention of a growing amount of scholarship in the past few decades, a new nexus of theorizing child migration has emerged from an array of academic traditions and contexts of migration. The fact that young people under the age of eighteen today constitute around one-third of the around 100 million forcibly displaced persons around the globe has placed the child in the midst of political controversies and global social transformations. At the same time as the pressing challenges of global migration have led to a significant increase in policy, practices and procedures that target children specifically, this has also propelled scholars to explore new methodological and theoretical avenues. The overall aim of the chapter is to examine some of the dominant theoretical approaches to child migration and what their implications are for our understanding of contemporary migration regimes. A particular focus will be on how scholarly work in childhood studies, the sociology and anthropology of childhood and migration studies, what here is referred to as a ‘childhood turn’ in migration research, has largely focused on empirical and conceptual aspects of children’s agency, experiences and perspectives in global migration. Yet, as is suggested, while the childhood turn in migration research grew out of a discontent with a lack of data on children and a dominance of traditional assumptions about children and family, the recent discovering of migrant childhoods in, for example, political philosophy has been driven by normative issues and theoretical trajectories in isolation from the empirical and theoretical achievements in childhood studies and migration studies.