The reality of being a Third Culture Kid

Ellen Mahoney is a textbook Third Culture Kid (‘TCK’). Born to American parents, she moved twice in the US before relocating to Japan aged seven, the result of her dad’s job at IBM. She moved back to the US for seventh through tenth grades and then to Singapore for 11th and 12th grades. At 18 she headed to Ohio for university.

She expected to navigate college well. She’d travelled the world, had a pair of New Yorkers for parents, and spoke perfect English. She’d lived in the US for a big chunk of middle and high school. But the transition to college was way rockier than she expected. 

“I felt really disconnected from Americans,” she says. “I didn't understand the culture, I didn't understand the sense of humour. I didn't understand references or even the values.” She felt deeply isolated and struggled to maintain healthy relationships. When things got hard, she moved on rather than dig in. 

Today, Mahoney is a successful entrepreneur. Her global perspective, fluency with the world and open-mindedness—key TCK attributes— have been instrumental to the career and life she’s built. Those early challenges around identity and rootedness led her to building a career around understanding Third Culture Kids and helping the schools they grow up in to understand them. In 2013, she founded Sea Change Mentoring, which delivers a social and emotional learning programme tailored to international schools, focused on creating relationship-rich environments to promote learning and wellbeing. 

Defining Third Culture Kids 

Dr Ruth Hill Useem and her husband John Useem, both sociologists, first coined the term “Third Culture Kids” in the 1950s. But it took off in the 1970s with the publication of Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds by David Pollack and Ruth van Reken. They identified some of the common strengths of ‘TCKs’, including linguistic skills, global awareness, and resilience. In 2024, understanding the world and being able to  traverse it comfortably is not just a privilege but a superpower. 

But the authors also identified some of the common challenges, including cultural rootlessness, difficulty with long-term relationships, and a complex sense of identity. 

“Regardless of how happy you were as an expat—and I was certainly very happy as a Third Culture child—you absolutely lack a sense of belonging and you struggle with your identity,” says Elizabeth Lamb, Executive Principal of Compass International School in Doha, part of Nord Anglia Education. 

Lamb, who is British, is on her 23rd home and her ninth country. As a child she lived in Hong Kong, Germany, and Cyprus along with various postings in the UK, the result of her father’s work in the military. She thinks the experience made her open-minded, an adventurer, an extrovert, and a world citizen. She also thinks there are challenges.

“There are questions I can't answer in my 50s that I couldn’t answer when I was 10, such as ‘where do you come from?’ I still don’t have a good answer.”

Sobia is a TCK now raising three TCK boys in Abu Dhabi. She is British born to immigrant Pakistani parents; her husband is Swedish and the boys have always lived abroad. “Being a Third Culture Kid myself, I am more aware that my children could feel this lack of belonging and I don’t want that for them.” She worries about the transition from Abu Dhabi to London, where the boys will likely attend university. “Although they are British, they’ve not lived in the UK. Will they be understood and will they understand the culture?” 

Mahoney defines Third Culture Kids as “someone who is growing up in a liminal space.” The first culture is the child's parents' culture, or cultures. The second culture is the culture of the host country or countries the child grows up in due to their parent’s employment. The third culture is the set of shared experiences that young people have who are growing up international and mobile because of their parents' jobs.

“My children are citizens of the world”

Schools and parents today are far more aware of the challenges and opportunities of raising kids far from ‘home’. “My children are citizens of the world,” Sobia says, a factor that differentiates them as individuals, to colleges and, to employers. TCKS are growing up in a more diverse community often leading them to be more open minded.

They have been exposed to many religions and cultural norms; they have deep lived experience considering multiple perspectives. Mahoney has noticed they tend to be “great communicators” able to read body language and social cues in a way many adolescents in more homogenous communities may not.

Words like belonging and identity are recognised and celebrated in ways they were not even 10 years ago. At the same time, globalisation means it’s easier to find familiarity in most corners of the globe. The proliferation of technology means that kids who move have way more tools than previous generations to stay in touch, from Snapchat and WhatsApp to multiplayer video games. 

But these changes can mask the deeper challenges of being a Third Culture Kid, namely forming sustaining relationships and building an identity, core work to childhood and adolescence.

What schools can do to support Third Culture Kids and their families

School leaders say creating a deep sense of community is key. “Belonging for us is belonging to our school community,” says Tim Richardson, Principal of The British School of Guangzhou, part of Nord Anglia Education. “The most important thing for our young people and also their families is that wherever they might have come from and wherever they may be going in six months’ time—or a year’s time or two years’ time—at the moment they belong to our community and that brings a richness to their lives.” That’s built through academics but also through social events and trips and extracurriculars. 

Richardson says classes are mixed up every year to encourage fewer cliques and more adaptability among the children. New children are assigned buddies and when a child finds out he/she is moving, the school can find someone almost immediately who has lived there. The curriculum is a global one, with a strong emphasis on local culture. Nord Anglia’s Global Campus offers a digital learning platform to connect kids around the world to collaborate—but also empathise.

Sobia agrees with this, noting that a strong sense of community in school can act as a sort of buffer to the winds of change outside. “The community is great inside, so we can manage what's happening outside,” she said.  

At Lamb’s school in Doha, children are exposed early to lots of specialist teachers. “We normalise moving around and managing a lot of relationships,” she said. 

She’s learned through her experience as a school leader as well as being a mother to Third Culture Kids that supporting parents is key too. After all, for students, it may be the only life they know. But for parents on their first assignment, the world suddenly seems very unfamiliar.

“If we look after the parents and they are secure, the children feel more secure,” she says. 

While there has been progress in recognising the unique needs of TCKs, plenty of work remains to be done. Lamb wishes there was more support in the form of counsellors, especially around the teen years when students are at the greatest risk of mental health challenges related to isolation. The transition to university is a hard one, and sometimes students need someone to talk to who isn’t a therapist but also who isn't a teacher or parents. “Sometimes what they need is half an hour in a quiet space to talk and be heard,” she says. 

Mahoney encourages schools to use alumni to help with those transitions. She runs teen focus groups around the world and what they crave is more advice from near peers rather than adults whose lives have so little bearing to theirs. She also suggests that schools focus on the stay-ers (those who don’t go) and not just the leavers. 

What parents can do: Make family the homebase

Sobia, who is raising three boys in Abu Dhabi, says creating a strong sense of community at home is the foundation to help kids thrive. “We always talk about our family home, and our unit,” she says. “Wherever that is, is where home is. That’s our safe zone.” 

Prepare for a move so it’s successful

Sometimes grown-ups assume that kids understand things that they don’t. “Explain what’s happening,” Richardson says. There’s a new job, a new opportunity. While some things will change, many will not. The family will remain intact. Friendships can be maintained. 

Richardson recounts his own move to Dubai as a young child, long before Dubai became an international hub. His mother was a teacher and took the time to explain what was going on. His village school had an assembly on Dubai—an event he suspects his mother was instrumental in organising. “If you are moving, if you are relocating, make sure you understand and appreciate how significant that is for your child,” he says. 

Work with the school 

Make sure to let the school know what’s happening and seek support. As Richardson says, that support can be helping to find a good-fit school in the new country to finding people in the child’s current school who might have lived in that country.

Progress, and more work to do 

There is more awareness and acceptance of the challenges facing Third Culture Kids. Mahoney recalls talking to a school leader at a prominent international school in Asia seven years ago and warning about the mental health challenges of TCKs. She was “politely shuffled out.” He came back a few years ago, distraught at soaring levels of anxiety and depression around him. “I think that we've been championing academic success at the cost of their mental health,” he told her. He wanted to know what to do.  

He’s hardly alone. 

“Building children’s emotional intelligence is one of the best things you can do from an early age,” she says. “It gives them the skills to navigate a pretty complicated childhood.”

Mahoney embraces the challenges now, and also is quick to point out she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I feel extremely privileged to have grown up cross-culturally and internationally.”

By Jenny Anderson (the award-winning journalist and author with 20-years of experience on staff at places including the New York Times and Quartz)