Third Culture Kids

lives filled with rich diversity and amazing experiences but often conflicted by the underlying question of where they really fit (Location 536)

The term third culture then refers to a way of life that is neither like the lives of those living back in the home culture nor like the lives of those in the local community, but is a lifestyle with many common experiences shared by others living in a similar way. (Location 586)

Interrupted relationships are the norm for many, (Location 614)

once they have seen and experienced the world “out there,” they feel far more at home in that bigger world than the place and culture their parents call home. (Location 644)

the passport culture, often the feeling of “being different” is strong. (Location 671)

children do not have sophisticated language to express the paradoxical feelings of their experience. It’s confusing for young TCKs to feel excited for the upcoming flight to see grandparents and cousins while simultaneously feeling great sadness to leave a place and friends they love. Educators may forget that the international (Location 766)

A traditional third culture kid (TCK) is a person who spends a significant part of his or her first eighteen years of life accompanying parent(s) into a country or countries that are different from at least one parent’s passport country(ies) due to a parent’s choice of work or advanced training. (Location 812)

Culture is also a system of shared concepts, beliefs, and values. (Location 1372)

In that traditional process, ultimately teens decided which practices or beliefs they wanted to keep for themselves. (Location 1448)

Once we have internalized a culture’s customs and underlying assumptions, or know who we are in relationship to this culture, an intuitive sense of what is right, humorous, appropriate, or offensive in any particular situation develops. (Location 1457)

Being “in the know” gives us a sense of stability, confidence, deep security, and belonging, for we have been entrusted with the “secrets” of our tribe. (Location 1459)

The normal feeling of many is to retrench and, like Tevye, long for the “good old days” when things seemed more in our control. (Location 1482)

It’s not hard to see on the global scene how this undefined, but real, sense of losing our cultural balance has led in many places to more attempts to define “us” and “them” by new rules regarding such things as immigration, dress, or specific behavior in hopes of regaining the sense of comfort that being in cultural balance can give us. (Location 1484)

One of the shared experiences of TCKs is that their truest sense of being in cultural balance is often in this world where moving between different cultures is the norm rather than the exception. (Location 1554)

One of the most important communities for TCKs, however, is the “third culture”—the expat subculture the Useems first noted. It is here where TCKs often feel the most “at home” because it is here that they share a lifestyle and cultural norms with others. (Location 1631)

The truth is most TCKs do have a community, an “interstitial culture” to which they belong but one defined by a shared experience rather than by place or nationality. (Location 1640)

“Finding a sense of personal and cultural identity and dealing with unresolved grief.” For our purposes we define unresolved grief as grief that comes from recognized and unrecognized losses, but one that has never been mourned in a healing way. (Location 1928)

lingering or episodic depression for no apparent reason, (Location 1931)

quick tempers for trivial situations or anger out of proportion to the event at hand, (Location 1931)