comment

It is on the basis that a provocative piece of writing can be beneficial in moving forward collective thinking that we offer this issue’s Comment – as, we hope, a stimulus to debate and (ideally!) to the generation of articles for publication in future issues of International School.

Our proposal is that it is time for the increasingly ubiquitous term Third Culture Kid, or TCK, to be abandoned – since it has long since passed its sell-by date, is vague in its meaning and is potentially misleading in its current wide and varied usage. In making our case we begin by returning to the original concept, identified by Ruth Hill Useem and John Useem in the 1950s. Both US university sociology professors who lived for some time in India, their observations of expatriate American children temporarily living in India before returning to their native country led to the first use of the term, embedded in the assertion that although these children “have grown up in foreign countries, they are not integral parts of those countries. When they come to their country of citizenship (some for the first time), they do not feel at home because they do not know the lingo or expectations of others – especially those of their own age. Where they feel most like themselves is in that interstitial culture, the third culture, which is created, shared and carried by persons who are relating societies, or sections thereof, to each other”.

Our first contention is that, in the more than half century since the Useems’ seminal work, the complexity of global mobility in children of professional families has changed almost beyond recognition. No longer is there necessarily one ‘home’ country and another country that acts as a temporary residence before return ‘home’. And while all globally mobile children (except in unusual circumstances) will have a passport of what might be inferred to be their ‘home’ country some may feel no attachment to that country and may never have visited it, much less have been born and raised in it. Nor is it any longer the case that the ‘home’ passport of such children will necessarily be that of a country which has been ‘home’ to both of their parents. There are now many globally mobile children who are second or third (or more) generation TCKs (for want of a better expression), whose parents have different passports, nationalities and first languages from each other; indeed, both sets of grandparents may also be from mixed backgrounds. What then, for such children, is the concept of a ‘home’ country? What meaning does a passport have for them, other than as an administrative convenience that allows them to cross national borders? And, depending on the countries in question, how many passports might such a child have that may be used for different purposes in different contexts? For such children, does the concept of a ‘first’ or home culture, a ‘second’ or ‘temporarily relocated to’ culture, and a ‘third’ culture still have currency?

Our second point arises from our observation in recent years of a growing appropriation of the TCK descriptor by some adults, who consider themselves to be ‘true’ TCK compared with others who in their view have a lesser claim to the label. We have come across a number of examples of adults describing themselves as a TCK, only to be told in no uncertain terms by others that they are mistaken. Competitiveness as to who is or is not a genuine TCK is not helpful, particularly given the lack of clarity in definition, and is another reason for re-thinking the conceptualisation of this increasingly complex phenomenon.

It is important to stress that we are not in any sense denigrating the original TCK definition. Indeed the Useems are to be thanked for having identified a number of issues that arise when children are temporarily displaced from a ‘home’ context. Our point is that the world has changed rapidly since the original term was coined, and it is now time for it to be replaced by something that more appropriately encapsulates the complexity of today’s world, where the concept of ‘home’ for the globally mobile has ceased to have the geographical connotations with which it has traditionally been associated. So there is our provocative argument: let’s drop the term Third Culture Kid. That was the easy bit: the difficult bit is what we might replace it with. (Norma McCaig’s ‘Global Nomad’ doesn’t do it for us either.) All ideas – particularly in the form of articles of between 600 and 1000 words that can be included in a future issue of International School magazine – will be more than welcome. We look forward to hearing your views!

We’d like to hear your thoughts on this and any other articles in this magazine Email editor@is-mag.com