Street-connected children and youth in Brazil have a unique way of circulating between different socio-spatial settings including the street, family homes and organisations, among others. It is important to explore how children’s and young people’s families and other relationships influence and are connected to their mobility. In this paper, I reflect on how to understand street-connected children’s and youths’ mobile social worlds through ethnography. In addition, I ask how street-connected children and youth practice and describe their social and spatial mobility in relation to the multiple settings in which they circulate. My study draws on ethnographic data collected in 2018–2023 in Recife and Salvador, Brazil. The participants are 17 street-connected children and youth, two family members and 6 professionals working with them. By integrating ethnography into outreach work methods of civil society and governmental organisations, I learned how street educators and social workers respect the children’s and young people’s agency and mobility practices with the orientations of pedagogy of hope and sensitisation. I elaborate on how mobile ethnography on the street, home and organisations enables learning about children’s and young people’s social worlds in their environments where they could be the teachers and subjects of knowledge. It is important not to romanticise their adverse street situations but to acknowledge and respect children’s and young people’s circulation and multilocality. I argue that street-connected children’s and youths’ relational lives include forced and autonomous mobility between different seemingly static socio-spatial settings. Street-connected children and youth are not solely agents moving as they wish – they move within complex relational processes that include various people and motives. Therefore, as street-connected children and youth are on the move, the ethnographer should also be. Through mobile ethnography, it is possible to co-create knowledge together with the children and youth in various locations that are significant for them.