It’s a late autumn afternoon in Hong Kong, the streets grey under relentless sheets of steel-grey clouds. I am 11-years-old, curled up in the backseat of a taxi, my dad’s cellphone pressed hard against one ear as hot tears roll down my cheeks. My world is falling apart and I can’t stop sobbing. I call one friend after another, as many as I can, repeating the same phrase, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving Hong Kong today. I’m sorry I never got to say goodbye properly. I’m sorry.”

Earlier this morning, everything in my world was in order. I lived with close family friends in Hong Kong, and was expecting a visit from my dad. Some months ago, he had accepted a job posting to Guangzhou, southern China, and my whole family moved to join him, except me. I was adamant that I stay in the city I so loved, the city that I called home, the city with friends whom I adored and a school that I loved. My parents relented, perhaps thinking that moving schools during the school year would not be helpful. They would let me stay until the end of the school year, still 8 months away. Then, we would reassess.

So this weekend visit from my dad was an ordinary one, a quick day trip to check on me before he caught an evening train back to the mainland.

Or so I had thought.

“Actually, you’re moving to China too. You leave today.”

I stared at my dad in disbelief, unable to absorb the news. It was sudden, rushed, with no discussion beforehand. That, in short, was how I found out I was to leave an entire city behind that very day, to take the evening train with my dad, to never see my friends at school again.

And so another chapter in life came to a halt, and I was launched into yet another school – my sixth primary school in my fourth country, and I was only in 5th grade. It would prove to be just the start of an itinerant life full of packing boxes and countless international flights. By age 20, I had moved house 20 times. Before graduating from university, I’d visited all 7 continents and travelled to over 40 countries. By age 30, eight countries across four continents had all once been “home”, including England, Singapore, America, China, and New Zealand.

In other words, I’d led the life of a Third Culture Kid (“TCK”) – someone who’d spent a significant portion of their formative years (ages 0-17) outside of their parents’ native culture, and had moved between countries often. As TCKs, we are often the children of diplomats or those who work in NGOs, the armed forces, multinational corporations, churches and immigrants or refugees who move often.

A Growing Community

The TCK community is large, and will only grow as our world becomes more interconnected, more multi-cultural. The purpose of this essay series is to explore the joys and the challenges of a TCK upbringing, to generate discussion on whether it’s a life worth replicating and, if so, how.

The need for these essays arose when a parenting community I’m part of broached the idea of raising TCKs as the benefits seemed evident to all (though many of the parents are non-TCKs) . It spurred me to reflect on my own experience, on all the things I’d gained and lost with my upbringing.

My main contention: the TCK life is one of immense privilege and of immense trauma. Whilst the benefits of such a life are perceived to be many, the lifelong problems brought about by such an upbringing are severely under-discussed – in part because the problems are often so well-hidden that it can take decades for them to be uncovered, before an adult TCK is capable or willing to fully accept the depth and scope of how they have been affected.

My hope is that this essay series would inspire more in-depth, nuanced discussions – both amongst non-TCKs considering whether or not to actively create a TCK life for their children and amongst adult TCKs who are now parents, many of whom are raising TCKs themselves and need to navigate the challenges of this lifestyle.

The essays will draw from personal experience (both my own and other TCKs), surveys, data, and research. It’s a series to share my lived reality but also hopefully offer a window into the broader TCK community. So let’s dive in.

On the face of it, a TCK life seems rich, diverse, and empowering. How can a life set against an international backdrop be bad? You’re exposed to different ideas, languages, and people. You’re said to emerge more inclusive, adaptable, resilient, and you’ve probably learned to speak an extra language or two in the process, making you much more attractive on the job market.

As an adult TCK, I can say that much of the above has been true for me. Today, I speak six languages; I’ve worked across four continents and can grasp cultural nuance readily; I bond easily with people and have an extensive group of friends worldwide. My interests are diverse, ranging from scuba diving to endurance running to photography to karate – many of which may not have been possible had I not been given a taste of adventure and developed a comfort in the unknown via my upbringing.

What, then, could possibly be so bad?

What the Statistics Actually Show

A look at the statistics reveals the fuller picture and, with it, some unpleasant truths: a TCK upbringing often brings with it not just one but multiple traumas. In 2021, a survey was conducted amongst TCKs to look at the occurrence of developmental traumas (Crossman & Wells, 2021). The results from 1,904 responses were compared to those of a major study conducted amongst the general population in America (CDC-Kaiser ACE Study, 1995-1997; number of people surveyed: over 17,000). Both studies looked at ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) factors, including physical and sexual abuse as well as emotional neglect. The methodology of the TCK study is discussed in detail here.

Comparing the outcomes of the TCK population and the general population shows some sobering findings (graph 1 below). For the purposes of our discussion, let’s look at the non-Mission group of TCKs (ie. children whose parents weren’t religious missionaries sent on postings by their church). The Missionary group of TCKs tend to have their own distinct attributes and I believe most of you reading this are looking at TCKs from a non-Mission perspective.

When looking at the experiences of the general population and non-Mission TCKs, what do we find? On the matter of emotional abuse, the general population reports an ACE score of ~11 compared to an ACE score of ~48 for non-Mission TCKs. In other words, the likelihood of non-Mission TCKs experiencing emotional abuse is more than quadruple that of someone raised in a regular, non-TCK way. On sexual abuse, the non-Mission TCKs’ score of 30 is roughly 50% higher the general population’s ACE score of ~21.

The frequency of mental illness in a non-Mission TCK household is double that in the general population (ACE score of ~38 versus ~19). Conversely, the general population has a higher ACE score for material neglect compared to non-Mission TCKs, though this comes as no surprise as non-Mission TCK families tend to be better off financially than the average household in the general population. Yet this relative financial wealth does not seem to help children avoid emotional neglect, as non-Mission TCKs have an ACE score of ~42 here, almost triple of the general population’s score of ~15 for emotional neglect.

I don’t know if the findings from these two surveys are surprising to non-TCKs, but personally, none of the TCK results surprise me.

If someone offered you a certain lifestyle saying it’s often reputed to broaden the child’s horizons and their ability to navigate the world, but then tells you, “Oh, but this sort of upbringing will statistically quadruple your child’s risk of experiencing emotional abuse and raise their risk of sexual abuse by 50%. Also, with this lifestyle the likelihood of someone in the family experiencing mental illness will double and your child’s likelihood of experiencing emotional neglect will triple” – would you still want to sign up for that lifestyle?

A Double-edged Sword

The truth is, for all the wonderful things that a TCK life can offer, it also creates a number of vulnerabilities and issues that echo through a lifetime.

One of the many problems it creates: the loss of a sense of belonging. If you’ve been largely born and bred in one place, with just one or two major moves in life, perhaps happening only when you leave for university or for a job as an adult, you likely have a clear sense of belonging to at least one community: the one into which you were born. Whether it’s due to a common language or cultural norms or food or religion, you will likely have developed strong bonds with some people over the course of 10, 15 years. These are the people who may have seen you in various stages of life, people who have seen your evolution as a person in some way; people who, in short, understand you.

For TCKs, there is no such thing. Everyone you know gets fragments of you; they may think they know you, but in reality they’ve only gotten snapshots of the you that existed at one stage in life. Because we have no stable, constant community to call our own, we exist essentially without roots. To choose a life that involves moving across several countries from a young age is to choose a path of rootlessness, to ask the child to go through loss and rebuild, loss and rebuild again and again.

When Home Doesn’t Feel Like Home

“We’ll make frequent trips back home, to our home country,” you might say. “That will help them keep their ties to a community.” Yet as the saying goes –

“You never step in the same stream twice.”

Even if you make frequent visits or move back “home” after a few years, you will have to confront irrevocable change. Your favourite cafe or shops may have shuttered, the neighbourhoods that held so many precious childhood memories now razed for re-development; at some point, when you were overseas, when you weren’t looking, the place you thought you knew so well had, too, changed and moved on.

When that happens, you – and your children – will be dealing with a TCK form of grief: a grief for a place and a community that appears to still exist, but has actually evolved and quietly slipped away over the years, only to exist now in memory.

I know this grief too well. For TCKs, there is no home to return to, because as we change, so do places. Communities evolve, new slang develops in the mother tongue. You return with outdated lingo and even short exchanges with locals will betray your new-gained foreignness, a stranger in your own land.

I find this grief particularly punishing on children, especially when I reflect back on my own experiences. Many a time I had been excited to “go home”, only to discover with a sharp jolt that the people and places I’d known had transformed.

How does a child, still lacking a comprehensive understanding of the broader world and their place in it, cope with this unanticipated shift in the idea of “home”, that intangible thing that is an extension of our own identity? How do you grieve for a loss that occurs without warning, a loss for which there is no gravestone to stand in front of nor a place to pay your respects? You can’t even seek comfort in the company of other mourners, because they – like you – are scattered across the world, and the local community cannot relate to your pain as they saw the changes happen slowly, organically, so little of it is sudden or shocking to them.

Google “TCK grief” and you’ll be in no shortage of personal accounts of this phenomenon, including this piece by Jezebel May which resonated deeply with me.

To raise your children as TCKs is for them to know grief. This is not a deal-breaker, necessarily. Grief is a part of life, after all. But for children to know grief so early on and to know such a peculiar brand of it – for which there are no established mourning rituals – is particularly demanding.

We have to ask ourselves: when a child is denied that most primal thing called a sense of belonging, what does that do to their psyche? To their sense of identity? It’s a precarious situation for a child to be in, to feel unmoored; it creates a number of vulnerabilities. Is it any wonder, then, that the statistics show what they do, and the rate of abuse and neglect are significantly higher for TCKs as a whole?

Whilst these problems aren’t insurmountable, they require far more support from the parents to help navigate. Without proper handling of this fundamentally destabilising experience, children must carry those layers upon layers of grief with them, and living with unresolved grief is akin to carrying an open, unhealed wound within our psyche.

To make things worse, a sense of belonging is not something fully under your control. It’s a two-way street, requiring both the individual to feel like they belong to a community and also for the community to embrace and accept that individual as one of their own. For TCKs, the latter is often lacking.

Here’s an anecdote from my own life: once, I’d taken a quick trip back to Hong Kong after being away for some years. Whilst shopping in a store, I held up a top and asked a member of the staff if a specific size was still in stock. When the staff member came back with the piece of clothing, he smiled and asked in a friendly way, “Did you just return from overseas?” Somehow, even in that short interaction, whether it was my speech or the way I dressed or something else entirely, this Hong Konger was able to quickly and quite confidently peg me as a non-local. Implicit in his question was an observation: “You don’t seem like you’re from around here”. I’ve had many such instances of being singled out as “not one of us” even when I was supposedly on home turf. That hurts: because it’s a form of othering. How can one truly feel at home when the home community doesn’t consider you one of them?

As an adult TCK, the way I manage this dilemma is simple: I no longer expect to blend in anywhere, and I certainly don’t attempt to learn the latest slew of slang used in Cantonese nor try to pass off as a Hong Konger just like any other; I accept that the way certain words are pronounced has changed in Hong Kong over the years and so the occasional tonal differences I utter would immediately label me an outsider in my passport country, as it would anywhere else in the world, since my English is accented in that TCK way: a hodgepodge of all the countries I’ve called home, tinted with familiar lilts and alien terms.

In other words, I’ve resigned to the fact that I’m too diluted in my identity to be called a Hong Konger without it causing confusion for others, and I accept the fact that I do not have a home to go back to anywhere, that the best alternative to “home” for me is a multitude of places, none of which represent me as a whole nor fully see me as one of their own.

Perhaps that taxi ride in Hong Kong so many years ago is emblematic of the TCK life, for no matter where in the world we are, we are perpetually on the move, shuttling from one place to another, looking out at a world that is tantalisingly close yet never truly reachable, a world from which we are always separated by a thick pane of glass.

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Author’s Note:
We’ve only scratched the surface of TCK problems today but there needs to be more discourse on the challenges inherent in this lifestyle and how we manage them.

For the next essay, we’ll be covering resilience, so often bandied about as a major benefit of a TCK upbringing, and fragility, its opposite concept. Why are the outcomes for TCKs so extreme, with many adult TCKs viewed as “resilient” yet so many others struggle with fragile emotional and mental states? If you’d like to stay posted when the next essay is up, subscribe for updates below. In the meantime, I hope this essay has given you food for thought, and I’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.