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Trips by migrant youth to their origin country are seen by institutional actors such as teachers and social workers as disrupting youth's educational progress, and some European countries have financial and legal consequences when these trips take place during the school year. We follow Ghanaian youth living in The Netherlands on their journeys to Ghana and study how they experience such trips and are affected by them. Trips allow young people to reconnect with family and old friends, recollect memories, and confront them with poverty in their country of origin, making them resilient and motivated when facing adversities in school in the Netherlands. This study investigates how young Ghanaians' mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16-25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people's educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

This chapter reviews literature on transnational children and young people of migrant background and identifies promising avenues for future research. Transnational children and young people of migrant background are recent subjects of study and have been primarily researched within a sub-field of migration studies, called ‘transnational migration’. Transnational migration studies have demonstrated that people who migrate remain engaged with their home regions while also establishing lives overseas. Likewise, people in migrant origin regions remain linked to migrants overseas in a multitude of ways. Yet most of this scholarship, which has emerged since the 2000s, has focused on adults. In this chapter we investigate recent scholarship that focuses on the ways in which young people of migrant background are transnational and how transnationalism shapes their lives. The chapter identifies three broad strands of literature. One strand, conducted in migrant receiving countries, focuses on young people who have not migrated themselves but whose parents have - the so-called second generation - and who, by consequence, develop transnational identities. A second strand, conducted in migrant origin countries, focuses on young people who did not migrate but whose parents did - the so-called left-behind - and as a result are transnationally engaged. A final strand looks at young people of migrant background who move, often multiple times, between the country where they reside and their or their parents’ country of origin and analyses in what ways these young people are affected by their mobility. This latter strand is the most recent and deserves more attention in future research.