Conventionally defined as the child’s embodiment of free-will, “agency” is one of the critical components of the international children’s rights agenda. As an unchallenged concept, agency locks the researcher into an adult-centric worldview with a western, liberal definition of the individual. In this paper, I seek to construct a different (child-centered) set of parameters for understanding children’s agency. Instead of beginning with the question “What did the child do (or not do)?” I begin with the question “How and why did the child behave as he/she did?” The latter question begins with emotions as its launching point and formulates agency as something relative to the individual child. While agency can include outright defiance of adults, it can also include adherence to social norms, such as gaining the approval of adults. It is important to consider what the children themselves understand as agency: it can look radically different across and within communities. Thus, I focus less on ascribing agency to the individual child, and more on unpacking the meaning of agency in its respective contexts. This paper is based on a case study of one young Palestinian growing up during the Second Intifada, a period (2000-2006) of intensified violence that came in the wake of the failed Oslo Accords. The child in this study in the throes of his normal life-course emotional formation, yet in the context of an environment that seeks his unchilding (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). He faces the additional crucible of conflicting emotional expectations about himself, his family, and his oppressor due to his unique, intersectional identity. Through the use of oral history and portraiture (Lightfoot-Davies, 1997), this paper shows how the boy develops an assemblage of survival tools, in which the conventional concept of agency is not always on the forefront of his mind. His tools are suitable for his age and based on kinship networks. While one case study does not speak for a whole generation of Palestinians, it does offer unique macro-level insights into experiences with children’s rights that quantitative research does not always catch.