Moving our kids across the world

I remember the day we presented our then tween-age daughter with the idea that we as a family move to South East Asia to take jobs in a little land-locked country - a country that, as our daughter immediately noted, did not have a single shopping mall or cinema. Her instant defensive response was "Duh, get a life". This for a parent translates into "I totally don't like this and I will make life uncomfortable for you". 

From nine to twelve years of age, 'tweenies' occupy the nether age between childhood and adolescence. Tweenies are the newest marketing target because they are able to wheedle lots of money out of their bemused and often distracted parents. Tweenie girls are brand-savvy, relentlessly policing the fashion statement that their household makes and precociously secure in their first-world consumer niches. In other words, this was not the best age to be transplanting our daughter into a developing country.

Our tweenie's upbringing was couched in the fun and freedom of our laid back coastal town and its mono-surf culture. Not only that, but the most 'ethnic' feature of our little piece of Australia was the local Thai restaurant that did a mean chicken satay on a Saturday night. However, our daughter's favourite dish was Pad Thai, so we sweetened the deal by pointing out that since Thailand would be just next door we could probably get authentic Pad Thai on tap. It would all be ok and so it was "Here we come!" to South East Asia.

We did take into account that many missionaries were sending their teenage children back to their home countries at the very time we were wresting our child away from hers. But we considered our particular child well enough adjusted and very flexible - she was our youngest and we had almost raised our family of six kids, coping with most of what they had brought our way. We were well up on the theory of re-location, we got enthused by books such as Marion Knell's Families on the Move: Growing Up Overseas and Loving It, and I ran parenting courses for a living. We felt confident.

So we packed up our home, left family, friends, and our beach, and fetched up beside the muddy Mekong. But we found ourselves novices in responding to the needs of our child as she launched into adolescence trying to find her identity and where she fitted in in a place and culture that had so much unfamiliarity. Whilst adjusting to obvious cultural changes, she struggled most with the loss of what she had left behind and she started to present with the classic profile of a 'trans-cultural kid' or 'third culture kid'.

So, what is a Third Culture Kid?

The term 'third culture kid' (TCK) was coined in the 1960s to describe children whose upbringing is cross-cultural, with periods of high mobility during a significant proportion of their developmental years. TCKs live in a neither/nor world, not fully in the world of their parents' culture nor in the world of their host culture(s). These young people tend to build relationships with all the cultures they have experienced, without having full ownership of any of them. Even though they assimilate elements from each culture into their life experience, their main point of identification is with others of similar backgrounds, for example other TCKs.¹

A major task for young people is to answer the key developmental questions, 'Who am I?' and 'Where do I fit?'. This task is problematic for kids who are not staying put. Normally, a child's culture provides a stable reference point from which they can answer these questions.² When children move, they lose cultural mooring and need to create a new reference point. That is why TCKs consistently gravitate towards other TCKs for their main point of identification.

The shock of the new

Our daughter had to cope not simply with moving away from Australia, but with moving to a country that is both third world and governmentally restrictive. She was not able to seamlessly continue exploring her cultural and personal identity in her new country of residence.

Freedoms that are taken for granted by young girls in her passport country were sharply curtailed. No more donning the Aussie beach uniform of denim cut-offs and skimpy halter tops. No more milling around the local mall after catching the latest chick flick and sighing over your latest 'celeb' crush. No more being able to physically hide in the crowd on days when you're having an emotional and/or physical 'bad hair day'.

Instead, for a young falang female, just stepping out through the gates of home brings instant attention. Our daughter found that all male eyes were unabashedly riveted in her direction. Fending off protestations of love from the local lads every time we were stopped at the traffic lights downtown had her cringing in the back seat of the family car. She had to forge a new personal identity that cloaked her femininity with a strong message of unavailability.

The freely available cultural input of local Aussie TV sitcoms that has shaped a generation of young Australians and was, for our daughter, the topic of hot convo the next day in the school yard was replaced by scrambled signal cable shows. All this created a yawning cultural vacuum into which went other influences that produce a fairly identifiable South East Asian TCK.

Our daughter became a young woman who expected to learn to ride a motor bike by 12 years or age, asked her parents to buy her a machete, and who insisted that an hour and a half drive (and an international border crossing) were worth it to visit the nearest McDonalds for breakfast. She speaks in two languages but can't spell in either, she sorts her friends by continent and hardly notices skin colour, and she has a different accent to her family members. She also drives a harder bargain with tuk-tuk drivers than I do, and she's secretly addicted to Thai soaps!

The benefits of cross-cultural living

In South East Asia, we have opportunities and experiences that we do not get at home. We cross international borders for a long weekend visit to friends - where else can one brush up one's French while enjoying a morning coffee downtown? We learn to incorporate house help into the fabric of our lives - who doesn't enjoy not being chained to an ironing board? Our children absorb unique food tastes from ketchup on their pizza to clumps of sticky rice and coconut in banana leaf wraps - what child doesn't thrive on the indulgent attention of the family mai ban (house girl)?

Our children's worldview is immediately expanded as they incorporate international friends into their inner sanctums and as they see the news through another cultural lens - or even right up close. Many missionary families are actually living in the midst of news zones and world-changing events. It was unnerving for us when, one year, our routine Pi Mai (New Year) shopping trip to Bangkok turned into a high coverage media event as the country erupted into civil unrest. Our daughter and her friend talked non-stop about how this shopping jaunt would never be forgotten.

But by far the most significant effect for TCKs is that they are the prototype citizens of the 21st century. As fewer and fewer cultures remain homogenous through the effects of modern communication and travel, these kids are what Marion Knell calls our future "culture brokers", developing observational, social, and linguistic skills alongside sensitivity in negotiating cross-cultural experiences.³

Working through challenges

Our family experienced the rich sensory input of South East Asia - smells, tastes, sounds, sights. The smell of our town is a mixture of wood smoke, charcoal chicken, lemongrass and river mud, and its sights always appear to me through a soft focus of hazy light. I am forever struck by the juxtaposition of modern and traditional in our city in South East Asia: the basket seller squatting outside the Samsung Electronics building; our own street bustling with a gaggle of turkeys, goats, and a pig with collar that all adroitly dodge the traffic and terrify pedestrians.

But there are also painful realities in this city. All around us, there are people who are struggling to survive on very few resources. The responsibility as a parent in all this is to raise our daughter with a developed sense of gratitude for what she has, alongside a deep empathy and generosity towards those who do not have the same kind of wealth. We have also had to foster her respect for this culture in the face of restrictions on her liberty and personal dress expression.

At the same time, with cross-cultural enrichment and awareness comes an ignorance of our home culture. As parents, we welcomed our child's sudden withdrawal from the company of angst-ridden teen characters on Aussie soaps such as 'Home and Away' and 'Neighbours'. The accents were broadly strine, the characters represented dubious role models (at best), and the plots were as shallow as a frog pond. But, having said that, these TV offerings afforded our daughter a means of cultural assessment.

Being away from Australia at times when our home country collectively experiences significant events deprives us, as a family, of the warps and wafts that weave national identity and bonding. We watched the carnage of the Australian bush fires in early 2009 from afar, but did not experience what it was like to be living in Australia at that time - and we know that we have missed something.

So while mobility fosters resilience and adaptability in our children, it also causes deep confusion in terms of politics, patriotism, and values.  "Which country do I belong to?" or "I fit in everywhere but I belong nowhere": these are classic TCK statements.

Surviving relationally

One of the wonderful things about TCKs is that they come to value relationships over things. They strongly identify the importance of belonging in relationships, and are adept at creating a rich relationship bank with a large number of friends. TCKs initiate relationship immediacy, decisively and quickly creating meaningful, deep connections in the here and now.

But the other side of the coin is the development of a migratory instinct or, conversely, a permanent yearning for stability. For our daughter, a successful friendship network made up of TCKs has been enormously important in the development of her emerging persona. But what remains hard for our daughter is the never-ending succession of goodbyes.

Once, when my daughter was grieving the imminent departure of a close friend, I suggested that she perhaps make friends in the future with the 'long-termers' here. She gave me a look - the one that says, 'You don't get it, do you?' - and told me, "It just doesn't work like that, Mum". In reality, my daughter was the healthy one, not me - she wanted to choose her friendships appropriately, instead of fabricating relationships that would allow her to sidestep the pain of loss. In other words, she was committed to processing her grief. My daughter's group of friends developed a rich closure ritual: a farewell basket full of local mementoes. The carefully chosen gifts were taken away by the leaving member, but the basket remains here to be used for the next friend who leaves.

The reality is that as Christians, all of us live as strangers in this world. We are all citizens of heaven living in societies that do not reflect the values of Christ's kingdom. The more we are indwelt by the Spirit and take on Christ-likeness, the more we will find ourselves living as aliens in our cultures (1 Peter 2:.11). For our Christian children, negotiating the developmental stages of their identity, a Christian community is essential for them to assess where and how they fit into their counter-cultural environment. This is even more crucial in a cross-cultural setting.

But herein lies the challenge. In closed communities, such as in South East Asia, there is very rarely a homogeneity in churchmanship and theology. The familiar routines and rituals of our daughter's faith walk at home- favourite worship songs, growing up in a local youth group, even an Australian ease around church gatherings - were replaced by a melding of international church styles. The strength lay in learning to accommodate each other, but the deficit was in having a faith community experience that left many of us feeling 'underfed'.

For us as a family, it meant that at home we cranked up the iPod and let rip on choruses of 'In Christ Alone' and 'Shout to the Lord'.  We talked to our Father constantly because our dependence on him had increased a thousandfold.

The crucial importance of family

Our family is going through a long learning process, wading through the adjustment times and the down times while actively seeking out resources that will help us to strengthen the benefits of cross-cultural living. In all this, our family interaction has been our cornerstone. We spend a heap of time together. We have resurrected our fun times and established the importance of ritual. Even in the midst of busy routines, we always set a candlelit dinner table and exchange the day's impressions and news. We play silly games and charades. Our tender good night ritual of devotions and hugs creates continuity from decades of family living - and it works just as well in South East Asia as in Australia! These traditions define who we are. They are comforting and stabilising, binding us together by creating shared history.

We also have learned how to do family and friendships at a distance. This means we put time into staying connected. We plan for visits from family and friends - one of the benefits of Australia being close to the South East Asia area is that some airline carriers come up with cheapie Asian runs and deposit our loved ones with us for as little as $30 for the round trip! Because of our later repatriation, strong ties with relatives and friends need to be maintained, especially for our daughter. But while we're here, there are substitute relationships for grandparents, aunties, uncles, and siblings that can serve as a valid extended family - if you put enough effort into developing relationships.

In the meantime, we are committed to our new culture, and we actively look for ways to enjoy, learn from, and contribute to our host culture. We can see our daughter beginning to forge more of those positive character traits of the TCK and negotiating the stickier ones with great aplomb and with oodles of courage.

So if you find yourself uprooting and moving your children around the world in response to God's call to you and your family, have as much fun, enrichment, and growth (often painful) with your TCKs as we are having with ours. It will be the ride of your lives!

In his service,
A mother

P.S. Our children have always had editorial license over what goes into print concerning our family, and this piece is no exception. It has been rigorously examined by daughter-in-residence to ensure that the privacy and dignity of the innocent are protected.

P.P.S. Since coming to South East Asia, Pad Thai is no longer our daughter's dish of choice. Her favourite is now sweet and sour chicken from the local Chinese dumpling shop.