What is a Third Culture Kid?
“A third culture kid is a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture. The third culture kid builds relationships to all the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture are assimilated into the third culture kid’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of the same background, other TCKs.”
Third Culture Kids: Focus of Major Study
-- TCK "mother" pens history of field
Many people have asked the origin and meaning of the term, "Third Culture" as we use it in Third Culture Kids or "TCKs" and, by extrapolation, in "adult-TCKs." To clear up one confusion, "third culture" is not synonymous with Third World nor with C.P. Snow's Third Culture. However, all are related in that these were early attempts to make summaries of what was happening in the world at the time of a major shift in the relationships among the peoples of the globe in the middle of the twentieth century.
The ending of colonialism, the dramatic increase in science and technology, and the rise of two relatively new world powers--the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.--all combined to make for major changes in the movement of human beings around the world and the purposes for which they were entering other societies.
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TCKs Experience Prolonged Adolescence
In earlier issues of NewsLinks (see January and May issues), we began to nibble at the edge of the mountain of data we have collected from the close to 700 American adult Third Culture Kids (TCKs) who have filled in our 24-page questionnaire about their third culture childhoods overseas and their subsequent lives.
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TCKs Four Times More Likely to Earn Bachelor’s Degrees
In this report we would like to reflect a little bit on an observation we made earlier-that three-fourths of adult TCKs feel different from others who have not lived abroad as children, and especially from those who have had no international experience. As one person put it, "In the US. I often feel like I'm living with only a split part of my personality. The other half of me doesn't know where to operate."
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ATCKs have problems relating to their own ethnic groups
Several million Americans have spent all or some of their formative years outside the U.S. as dependents of American citizens working abroad. Most TCK research focuses on re-entry difficulties. Our research on these Third Culture Kids has a different focus than most.
We ask what kind of life choices adult TCKs make; what skills, world views, and opinions they carry from a third culture childhood into their adult lives, and how they evaluate the long-term effects of these experiences. To avoid extreme feelings associated with re-entry we have deliberately included no one younger than 25; the oldest respondent is 87.
ATCKs generally agree that their international backgrounds contribute positively to their adult lives. Two-thirds or more report a beneficial impact on most roles and relationships.
The TCK experience is given less credit for benefiting relations with spouse and community activities, not because of any detrimental effects, but because more regard it as irrelevant to those relationships.
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