Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds

by David C. Pollock

  Why is it that TCKs so often seem to relate across what would typically be profoundly distinct social, cultural, and racial lines? In the previously cited situations, these are not all fellow TCKs relating only to each other. These are people from very different backgrounds, language, and experiences in true relationship. How can that be?

  When a TCK sits by the fire in the village and asks his friend questions about his life, the two are connecting as people. In sharing their stories, both are meeting the fundamental needs of relationship—being known and knowing others. The details of the stories are different but they understand the shared emotions of gladness when stories of success are told or sadness when stories of a child’s death emerge. TCKs on tour on the Masai Mara understand how much joy their tour guide has when he successfully finds them the animals they want to see. Why? Because, as a person, this guide also wants to know the satisfaction of a job well done. While the TCK’s life may be very different in detail from all these friends— that TCK isn’t a village person, a guide on the Mara, or a banker who can afford to invite friends to Bali, and none of these others is a TCK—yet they have related deeply at the human level despite the amazing differences in their stories.

  So how does this relate to reentry? Simply this: TCKs who have related to people quite different from themselves so comfortably need to remember a couple of bottom-line lessons they have learned from their cross-cultural life experiences when they return home.

  1. People from the home culture are persons too. They want relationships, they feel, they can create and think like others around the world. Again, their circumstances may be different, but their shared humanity is not.

  2. People from the home culture also have a story.. Once TCKs and ATCKs understand this, instead of waiting around to be asked their own fascinating story, they can take the initiative to ask those in the home culture about their lives. Just as it was in any other culture, through the stories of those who live in a community, we learn about the history and culture of that place, not only about that person.

  3. People from the home culture can understand the emotions of your story even when they don’t share in the details. TCKs must remember that others may not have all the hooks upon which to hang and retain every interesting detail of their exotic story (or vice versa), but as they tell it over time and from the perspective of what they felt as they experienced various situations, new friends can make that emotional connection even when they don’t remember every detail.

  4. People all around them have lived far more similar stories than they may have yet recognized. Part of the beauty of expanding to look at the world of CCKs is to see how many people are, in fact, living similar lives of cross-cultural interactions, mobility in different ways, and in worlds their parents never knew, under different labels. Some have been doing it for generations without recognition. Again, the details may differ, but there are intense places of specific shared connection in these stories, and deep friendships can be formed here as well as with local friends or other TCKS.

  When TCKs (and all others) see this most fundamental fact of the human likeness they share with others, they don’t need to fear losing their sense of identity, no matter where they are, reentry or not. And then, in the mystery of life, they can look without fear at where they also differ from others, for we also have a need to be unique! The beauty of the flipped iceberg is that we can see both our likeness to and our uniqueness from others. That, in the end, is a pretty strong place of finding our identity!

  While many TCKs look back on their reentry period as one of the more stressful parts of their TCK experience, they still wouldn’t have missed much of what they learned from the process. Often they emerge from reentry with an awareness of how their own culture works and operates in ways those who have never left may never see. This awareness can help them decide, perhaps more proactively than they might have otherwise, which values of their own culture they want to keep or let go of. Most also come to appreciate the special gifts they have received from each culture that has been part of their lives, including this one finally known as “home.”

  Lessons from the TCK Petri Dish

  One of the first “aha” Moments for Ruth regarding the expansion of the TCK concept to the larger area of TCKs came when listening to members from an immigrant community try to understand what was “wrong” with their first and second generation U.S. Born children. These immigrants were trying to raise their children within the cultural values and practices of their homeland, but when these children returned on vacation to visit their grandparents, they didn’t seem to fit in. Relatives in that country berated the parents for not raising their children “right.” At this point Ruth realized for the frist time a major difference between immigrant communities of old, who landed on their adopted shores expecting never to return to their homeland again, and today’s immigrant experience. In the first case, assimiliation and integration into the new culture were the highest priorities. To make it, they had to fit and blend in the new land. The option to return, even for short visits, usually wasn’t part of the equation. In todays’ world, however, immigrants easily travel back and forth between their present and past worlds, just as traditional TCKs do. This means immigrant CCKs may frequently experience being hidden immigrants in their former homelands. Certainly, these realities also apply to many of the other groups, including international adoptees who might try to go and visit their birth countries, where they will look alike but not be alike in the deeper layers of their values and world-views. Minority CCKs or borderlander CCKs, who function in the dominant culture by day but return to their ethnic subculture each evening, tell us they go through reentry on a daily basis! Refugee families who try to return to their passport country after the violence ceases report very similar types of responses, especially from the children born or raised during this time away.

  But we also believe that many CCKs of all groups experience close interpersonal interactions between highly diverse cultural groups at the most fundamental parts of life. This may be one of the greatest gifts CCKs have to offer others in our changing world—demonstrating that it is possible to move beyond old stereotypes and boundaries to meet the real people behind who we might otherwise assume them to be based on the visible aspects of our world and theirs.

  CHAPTER 18

  How Sponsoring Organizations Can Help

  In all my travels, conversations, and research, I’ve discovered that the only people who had relatively easy identity encounter experiences related to growing up globally were those who had been introduced to the terms “global nomad” and “third culture kid” while still living overseas, or those who were offered repatriation services upon coming “home” and heard the terms that way (or at least subset terms like “missionary kid,” “oil brat,” “military brat,” and so on.1

  —Barbara F. Schaetti, Ph.D.

  IN ADDITION TO PERSONAL AND PARENTAL CHOICES that can help TCKs thrive in their experience, the policies and the programs (or lack thereof) of sponsoring organizations weigh heavily in the equation. Even if parents and TCKs do everything we’ve suggested to maximize the TCK experience, CEOs and human resource managers of international organizations need to realize that their personnel policies have a profound effect on the employee’s family—for example, a company asking its employee to move in the middle of a school year or an organization only paying for one type of schooling. At home, employers rarely have any influence on the schooling and living choices of their employees, but in cross-cultural situations the ramifications of corporate and organizational decisions filter down through the family of every employee affected by them.

  Administrative decisions based solely on the interests of the international organization are shortsighted. Agencies should consider family needs as well as corporate needs when planning to send an employee overseas for at least two reasons.

  1. It’s for the long-term benefit of the company. Eighty-six percent of moves fail due to stresses on the f
amily.2 Given the high cost of preparing and sending families overseas, premature ending of assignments affects the sponsoring organization’s bottom line. When agencies help employees meet their family’s needs—whether for schooling, travel, or home leave—parents who work for the agencies are far more likely to stay with the company longer and be more productive. Since the cost of sending an employee overseas usually costs two to five times that employee’s annual salary,3 agencies benefit financially if they can keep their seasoned, internationally experienced employees from departing prematurely.

  Keeping employees with strong cross-cultural skills also helps an agency’s performance in relationship to the host culture. New people trying to learn those skills are bound to make more professional and social gaffes that hinder their effectiveness in a strange culture than someone who has already gone through the process of cross-cultural adaptation. After all, there are lessons about crossing cultures that only time can teach.

  2. Sound family-aware corporate policies are not only good for the corporation or agency, but also are good for the family. In 2008, Robin Pascoe, a true pioneer in spousal and family issues for expatriates, did a survey of 656 expatriates living in 62 countries and representing 44 countries. She writes, “In serving family needs, it’s not only a company’s bottom line which is at stake in areas such as attracting and retaining good employees who are productive and loyal and will not walk out the door to the competition upon repatriation. The family system—the relationships between partners and their relationships with their children—is also put at risk when a deployment is handled badly or with indifference.”4

  When corporate or organizational decisions are made with families in mind, the family feels protected and cared for, a relationship that any organization should wish to cultivate as part of the organizational or corporate culture. With each family member having space to grow and develop, parents can make decisions only they are qualified to make—decisions that will help their children effectively use their cross-cultural heritage. In turn, the organization or corporation is able to retain these highly qualified parents as now well-contented employees.

  How Agencies Can Help Prior to the Overseas Assignment

  Dave Pollock talked for years about the “flow of care” organizations and corporations need to put in place once they begin sending families overseas. It begins before they go. In the “Family Matters!” survey, Pascoe compares the reports from surveys done among headquarters of international organizations with responses from the employees and their families related to preassignment preparation. While most of the companies felt they did predeparture training, almost two-thirds of the employees who took this survey said they had no help offered. The survey found that only about 20 percent of the accompanying spouses received help, 12 percent of the working partners had predeparture training, and only 6 percent had assistance for the entire family. Since nearly 70 percent of the respondents listed family reasons, including marital breakdown and children’s education, as the top reasons for failed assignments, it is important for corporations and sponsoring organizations to work hard in this area of support for families.5

  One of the most important steps an organization can take for its overseas employees is to make sure the employees know the schooling options they will have well before the date of departure. Corporations and organizations must make their policies and practices regarding educational costs and choices clear. Of those surveyed, 50 percent said they were offered a trip during that period to go to the new location, see the schools, and consider their housing, and they felt this preparation was extremely helpful.6

  A second valuable step is to plan a preassignment orientation. This training should include tips for living in a new culture as well as for transition itself. Some international agencies are doing an excellent job of this, offering workshops for both the employee and the employee’s spouse and children. Other agencies, however, still think only of the employee and make no preparation for the intercultural adjustments the employee’s family will inevitably face. Such agencies should seek outside help from cross-cultural training consultants and organizations.

  Finally, and perhaps even more important than the two preceding strategies, organizational managers need to gather information on how often and why personnel are transferred to new locations. Since many challenges of the TCK experience are so closely tied to high mobility, administrators must look for ways to minimize the frequency and severity of the transition cycles. For example, why do embassy personnel change posts at least every two years? Is it always because of staffing needs, security reasons, or is it simply tradition? Similarly, when a business decides to send a person overseas, is it essential that the employee go in the middle of the school year? Sometimes moves can’t be avoided, but other times, with creative thinking, perhaps they can. Simple matters like examining the options for moving a family during a school vacation or after a child graduates can make all the difference as to whether a family thrives or barely survives in a cross-cultural lifestyle. At the Moment, there seems to be a trend for short-term assignments, with families remaining in the passport country. Serious consideration needs to be made on how this may affect the long-term family dynamics as well as how it fits into organizational staffing needs.

  How Agencies Can Help During the Third Culture Experience

  An agency’s responsibility to the family’s well-being doesn’t end after the final plans for departure are made or good-byes said. To increase a family’s chances of success abroad, the agency should have a plan in place that includes the following components.

  1. Have an entry team or a designated employee to welcome new employees onsite. This was at the top of the list when Pascoe asked her respondents what the sending company or organization could do to help the families.7 Each agency should have a formal plan for introducing new people to both the host and expatriate community as quickly as possible. It’s important for newcomers to know the people they need to contact locally for business connections as well as for the practical issues of life that long-time residents take for granted. We know of one young couple who went overseas where, after their initial welcome at the airport, were left on their own to figure out how to get their driver’s licenses, find someone to install a phone, and even locate a doctor when a family member became sick. It was three months before they met anyone who explained to them where they could buy meat they could actually chew. The problem there was that the home office presumed that families in the overseas branch would take care of properly orienting new arrivals but had no formal plan in place to make sure that was done.

  Sometimes people are assigned to a post where they are the only employees from their particular home country. Those from the local culture may work hard to make the newcomers feel welcome and introduce them to local customs and stores, but it is helpful during this time if newcomers can find others from their home culture as well. These people are the ones who know the types of products the newcomers can substitute for things they have been accustomed to using at home. They are also the only ones who might think to explain, for example, that a siren going off in bad weather means a tornado may be approaching. Local residents are so accustomed to these things that they don’t think to explain it or realize these new friends have never been around tornadoes before.

  2. Help employees evaluate schooling options using the compiled list put together before departure. Agencies should never insist on one particular method of schooling for their families. As we’ve said, parents must have freedom to consider each child’s personality and special needs when making this critical choice.

  Agencies must also take into account the additional costs of education for expatriate children. Part of the employee’s salary and benefits should include helping with those costs. In the home country, educational expenses for children are rarely discussed when negotiating a job contract, but schooling is often a complex and costly issue for expatriates, especially in certain countries.

  3. Estab
lish a flexible leave policy. Policies for leave vary from agency to agency. Some insist their employees remain onsite for four years, followed by a one-year home leave. Others have a cycle of sending people overseas for eleven months, then home for a month. Between those two ends of the spectrum lie other alternatives. There are pros and cons to each—both for the sponsoring organizations and the families. Wise administrators are willing to negotiate mutually beneficial leave packages if the standard policy for that organization doesn’t work for a particular person or family.

  4. Make provision for children who are attending school in the home country to visit parents during vacations. Traditionally, many sponsoring organizations have paid for TCKs to return home for vacations if they were away for schooling through secondary school, but once those children returned to their home culture for university, those benefits ended. It’s during those post-secondary years, however, that many major life decisions are made, years when parental support and guidance are crucial. Many organizations lose valuable employees whose children are at this critical life crossroads; many employees would rather resign than be separated from their children for long periods of time—particularly if the parents are in a situation where they can’t afford to pay personally for frequent trips.