Coming Home

Third Culture Kids. If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely that you either are one or are the parent of one – or at the very least, you know one. But what exactly is a ‘third culture kid’ (TCK), and what are the unique benefits and challenges that such an identity brings? 

At ZIS, where the student body is drawn from 55 different countries and students speak 40 mother-tongue languages, it’s almost the norm to be a TCK. At its simplest, the term describes children ‘who accompany their parents into another society’. That was the formulation used by pioneering American anthropologist Dr Ruth Hill Useem, who coined the term ‘third culture kid’ in the 1950s. 

Neatly, the label didn’t just fit Useem’s study subjects – the offspring of American citizens living and working abroad – but her own three children, who accompanied Ruth and her sociologist husband to India for year-long research periods among expatriate communities. To this day, TCKs usually fall into one of four major groups: the children of diplomats, military personnel, missionaries or corporate executives. 

But if the origin of the TCK phenomenon – globetrotting parental career choices – remains essentially unchanged, the experience itself has grown ever more complex since Useem’s initial observations. “Once, what you called third culture was really second culture,” says Professor Harry Korine, Class of 1980 (1977-80), Adjunct Professor of Strategy at INSEAD. “You had parents from the same country, and they lived in another country with their children. But now we increasingly have a true third culture with families like mine: my mother was American, my father from the Middle East, and I grew up in Switzerland.” 

As the great global cities and top universities draw together people of many nationalities and it becomes increasingly common to undertake overseas postings, people are falling in love – and raising families – across borders. And if those families relocate to yet another country, the result is a fully third culture experience for the children. 

It’s a predicament that Emilie Leffler, Class of 2006 (1994-2006), understands all too well. The child of a Swedish father and English mother, Emilie was born in the UK, lived in the US through her early childhood, then was raised and educated in Switzerland. The one geographical anchor was the family’s holiday home in Portugal. England became the choice for her higher education, “but it was there,” she recalls, “that the whole TCK thing came to the fore”. 

Her university, in Surrey, was “fantastic, educationally”, but it soon became apparent that despite her maternal heritage, UK citizenship, and English mother tongue, Emilie was much more of an international student than she appeared. “There were the small but important things: I’d grown up with none of the traditional English TV soap operas, for example. At the grocery store in Switzerland there were just three flavours of crisps – here there were aisles of them. My accent isn’t English, but it’s not American either. And with speech, there’s a difference between colloquial English and international English.” 

But if university proved a dislocating time for Emilie, she has found that as an employee her TCK identity is a considerable asset. “I’ve worked for big, multinational companies with a really mixed workforce. So [as a TCK] you can deal with that well. And it’s also a conversation starter. Whenever I talk to people, they try to work out my accent. You’re able to stand out. I’m in a sales role, and that helps.” 

Professor Harry Korine notes that school alumni networks, rather than the more common university alumni networks, could become a key support and mentoring provider for transitioning TCKs, something ZIS is planning to introduce. “I identify very much with the anxieties, particularly with the transition to college,” he says. “I’ve seen many young people feel the pressure of not only being away from family, but also having to adapt to a monocultural environment. That’s where the idea of a mentoring scheme comes from.” 

Indeed, many international schools are paying increasingly close attention to how they can best prepare, support and inspire their students. One new recruit to the teaching body at ZIS is Dr Jeff Steuernagel, university and career counsellor at the Upper School. His doctorate explored, among other questions, the intercultural sensitivity of adult TCKs working in international schools, and found that “having these diverse experiences early in life has a profound impact on how we experience the world later”.