“Avión!” I shouted while pointing up to an airplane in the sky, to the astonishment of my parents. English is my first language, but my first word was in Spanish. I was born into a lifestyle of adventure: playing with children in multiple languages, memorizing the interstate corridor down the western coast of the US, taking solo international flights as a teenager and filling multiple passports with stamps, traversing deserts and beaches and rainforests and pyramid tunnels, absorbing new languages and cultures seemingly through osmosis, saluting the flags of two nations and wondering which one to cheer for in the Olympics, meeting many thousands of acquaintances that I’ll never see again, and gaining behind-the-scenes familiarity with hundreds of different churches. I struggle to answer the question of where I’m from because I’ve explored more of my family’s host country than my family’s passport country. I try not to mention these things when meeting new people because many can’t even imagine such a life. Yet for Adult Third Culture Kids like me, these kinds of experiences constituted our childhood and therefore our normal.

Third Culture Kids or TCK’s are kids who spend part of their developmental years abroad because their parents are missionaries, diplomats, expats, military, etc. Common experiences defining this group include a “cross-cultural lifestyle, high mobility, expected repatriation, often a ‘system identity’ with sponsoring organization/business” ¹ . These experiences result in traits common to TCK’s including a greater aptitude for crossing into new cultures, adaptability, empathy, open-mindedness, and stronger communication skills ² . Not only does a TCK learn to blend into the specific cultural environments where they grew up, but these traits also port into a wide variety of cultures and contexts.

While such a lifestyle is marked with rich experiences that develop highly-valued traits, not everything about the TCK experience is positive. They also share more challenging traits like complex identity, uncertainty of social customs based on experiencing multiple cultures instead of a single culture, uneven maturity, and higher frequency and extremity of change and transition. Expert Tanya Crossman shares that TCK’s experience more grief before adulthood than most monocultural individuals do in a lifetime ³ . Deeper research has revealed common issues among adult TCK’s including unresolved grief, difficulty forming and keeping long-term relationships and roots, career instability, higher suicide rates ² , and in some circumstances higher Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) scores ⁴ associated with greater health risks.

Fortunately many of the challenging, long-term effects can be preventable with tools and training for families and their support systems. In recent years, mission organizations are recognizing the critical importance of TCK care and family training and are making hopeful strides toward establishing preventative measures. 

Global Frontier Missions has partnered with Lauren Wells, pioneer in the field and founder of TCK Training, to develop a new Family Program in tandem with our Missionary Training School. Now parents can gain invaluable insight into the world of TCK’s and be equipped with tools for caring well for their whole family as they step into a cross-cultural lifestyle. In addition to parents becoming better prepared, children also receive their age-appropriate information that correlates with the adult Missionary Training School to facilitate family discussions. School-age children learn about other cultures and religions, strengthen their faith in God, and gain familiarity with life skills like making friends, learning words in another language, and saying goodbye well. Armed with recent research on Positive Childhood Experiences ⁵ and practical ideas for implementation, the program is designed to prepare the whole family for living in a cross-cultural environment. 

With informed care, the positive effects of growing up overseas can greatly outweigh the challenges. Raising children overseas can set them up with high potential to thrive in a breadth of contexts, not only culturally but also socially, in the business world, and wherever they contribute to society. And with globalization, these strengths will become increasingly useful in a multicultural world that is quickly blending. In many cases, raising children overseas can be an invaluable gift that keeps on giving. Consider how a multicultural influence benefitted Barak Obama, Colin Firth, Freddie Mercury, Yo-Yo Ma, Viggo Mortensten, and Audrey Hepburn ⁶ , among others.

 As one who has personally experienced both the good and hard aspects of international life, I am thrilled about GFM’s Family Program and have marveled at the way God has arranged circumstances and connections to bring this vision to fruition. During pilot programs, we have already seen children gain confidence in learning a new language and making friends from other cultures and parents taking factors into account that they had not previously considered. By God’s grace, we even witnessed one dear child join God’s family by putting faith in Christ. I look forward to seeing what God continues to do through this program. Perhaps one day we’ll reunite around a campfire, laughing and swapping adventure stories with deep gratitude for God’s care expressed through the missions community for TCK’s like us.

Written by: A GFM Staff Member