http://www.thedailybeast.com/
blogs-and-stories/2008-11-26/obamas-third-culture-team/

(Note the line-wrap in the URL above)

Ruth Van Reken and Paulette Bethel found people who said: ‘I feel like a third culture kid, but I don’t fit the model!’.

These people, who were not traditional TCKs, felt similar issues of loss and grief. Bethel and Van Reken called them ‘Cross-Cultural Kids’, because, as children, these people had lived across cultures (or sub-cultures):

• Traditional TCKs —Children who move into another culture with parents due to a parent’s career choice,
• Bi/multi-cultural and bi/multi-racial children —Children born to parents from at least two cultures or races,
• Children of immigrants —Children whose parents have made a permanent move to a new country where they were not originally citizens,
• Children of refugees —Children whose parents are living outside their original country or place due to un-chosen circumstances such as war, violence, famine, or other natural disasters,
• Children of minorities —Children whose parents are from a racial or ethnic group which is not part of the majority race or ethnicity of the country in which they live,
• International adoptees —Children adopted by parents from another country other than the one of that child’s birth,
• “Domestic” TCKs —Children whose parents have moved in or among various subcultures within that child’s home country,

Bethel and Van Reken note that these children are often in more than one of these circles at the same time. For example, a traditional TCK may be also from a minority group, and a child of immigrants may have parents from two different cultures.

I find it interesting that many of my close friends fall into one of the categories above.

References

Paulette M. Bethel & Ruth E. Van Reken: Third Culture Kids: Prototypes for Understanding Other Cross-Cultural Kids, http://www.crossculturalkid.org/cck.htm (web-site under renovation as of 29 Dec 2008)

Self-doubt hit me after writing this blog’s first post.

How much of my life has really been impacted by being a third culture kid? How would my limited view-point be relevant to other TCKs out there? How can I write about the experiences of returning to one’s birth-culture, when I only spent four years back there, before jetting off to the Wonderful Land of Oz? And in Oz, whatever cultural dissonance I face is surely more akin to a migrant’s experience, rather than a third culture kid’s?

And the big one: am I really a third culture kid? Aren’t TCKs meant to closely identify with their ’second’, formative culture? I don’t.

The preceding paragraphs illustrate one of the costs of being a TCK. I am often not sure of… well, many things. Like a leaf, I am tossed from one way of thinking to another.

Ruth E. Van Reken is an adult third culture kid herself, who has researched and written widely on the Third Culture Kids and Cross-Cultural Kids phenomena. I have read articles on her web-site (site under renovation as of 29 Dec 2008), and her book ‘Letters Never Sent’. Reading the latter requires a box of tissues on the side. Non-TCKs may think it unhealthily introspective.

She says in her article ‘The Paradox of Pain and Faith’ (found by scrolling down a couple of pages at http://www.crossculturalkid.org/blog/excerpts/:

The first reality TCKs share is that they have been reared among and in more than one culture.

I am a third culture kid.

Recommended Reading:

Have a browse through Ruth Van Reken’s articles at http://www.crossculturalkid.org

‘Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds‘ by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken is a highly recommended book on this topic. I’ve ordered it from Amazon.com. It is also available at Borders.com. In Australia, Word Bookstore lists this as out-of-stock, but available on special order.