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| Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds (Second Revised Edition) | 
 enlarge | Authors: David C. Pollock, Ruth Van Reken
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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You Save: $7.10 (36%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (33 reviews)
Sales Rank: 14996
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1857882954
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.32
EAN: 9781857882957
ASIN: 1857882954
Publication Date: May 25, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Third Culture Kids speaks to the challenges and rewards of a multicultural childhood; the joy of discovery and heartbreaking loss, its effect on maturing and personal identity, and the difficulty in transitioning home.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 28 more reviews...
 Military families need this book!!!! December 24, 2008
I wish I had this book years ago. It addresses many issues that affect children of military families later in life both positive and negative. It has helped me understand my oldest daughters current adult depression. Her counselor recommended the book. As a parent, teacher, and a military spouse I highly recommend this book.
 Emotional manipulation trumps scholarship every time December 6, 2008
A poisonous book, in which Pollock and Van Reken (mostly, one suspects, Van Reken) pay out on their own parents and all other parents like them for the damage they perceive to have been inflicted on them by their overseas upbringings.
The book is peppered with folksy little personal anecdotes, in the style of Readers Digest. Here's one that Van Reken chooses to include, in her own book, about herself.
Until Ruth Van Reken was thirty-nine ... she had no idea that the day her parents and siblings left her in the States and returned to Nigeria for four years was the day her family, as she had always known it, died. Never again did all six children live with two parents as a family unit ... Ruth allowed herself to experience for the first time the grief of that moment twenty-six years before - a grief almost as deep as if she had just had a phone call that her family had been killed in a car wreck.
This kind of stuff - and the book is full of it - is simply emotional manipulation, not scientific research or scholarship. And one can only assume that Van Reken has never actually suffered the tragedy of losing a family member to a car accident.
The terminology throughout the book is of "TCKs" - Third Culture Kids - with the "third" culture being one that is neither the child's home country (the one he or she comes from) or host country (the one where the child is living). However what this third culture consists of is never adequately explained, apart from some anodyne references to the commonality of experiences among children who have grown up in foreign cultures, and the similarity of the stories they have to tell when they get together, for example at the many profitable seminars Pollock and Van Reken run. (What do they expect strangers who have grown up overseas to talk about when they meet for the first time at a seminar on growing up overseas? Football scores?)
Since the "third culture" is never really explained, the reason for the terminology is not particularly clear. Why didn't Pollock and Van Reken use other words that are already in existence to describe the same thing, for example "expatriate"? Perhaps the answer lies in the "K" - kids. Because they also refer to "ATCKs" - Adult Third Culture Kids. What is an "Adult Kid", you may ask? Well, probably someone like the authors. Someone who is still blaming everything that's wrong with her life on their parents. Someone who still sees his or her parents as powerful beings who could and should have done better but for some reason elected not to. Someone who has not reached the stage (which comes to most of us when we grow up) of acknowledging that we do the best we can with our own children but are not perfect, and, in turn, can acknowledge that our own parents probably did the best they could in the circumstances too.
The last part of the book, in particular, is filled with advice for parents and "sponsoring organizations" (the mission, military, employer or others who are responsible for the family's relocation overseas). Parents "should" or "must" do this or that. If the children have to be sent home for higher education but family support there is inadequate, the authors write, then "parents should think seriously about staying home themselves until their child is secure in his or her new life. This may cost the parents of such TCKs a few years of their careers, but failure to do so may cause their children lifelong harm...". So take that, mom and dad. You caused me lifelong harm because you wouldn't put your career on hold for me.
Well yes, that's very nice, but the reality is that parents are responsible for earning the money to put food on the table and, if possible, pay for that higher education. And not everyone working overseas has the option available of giving up the posting and returning to a secure position in the home country. In America, today, it's probably quite unusual for the breadwinner to have to work away from home base for an extended time such that the family cannot always be together as a unit. In other times and places this has been, and still is, common.
And again - "there are always trade-offs and sacrifices in making a cross-cultural move, but parents must never sacrifice their children". Well, of course, but in the real world - for adults - things aren't quite so simple. What if you do go overseas, and one child prefers it to the home country and wants to stay, but another hates it and wants to leave. You do your best for the family, but it may simply not be possible to please everyone. Ultimately you may have to sacrifice the interests of one or the other. Van Reken's answer would probably be that you shouldn't have gone in the first place - but then you would have deprived the first child of the pleasure of living overseas at all.
This aspect of life choices is missing from the book: the fact that while you do your best for your children, you cannot give them everything, and every option you do take cuts off others. Electing to stay home rather than live overseas is a choice too, and while it gives the child one set of benefits - stability, closeness to relatives, a constant set of companions throughout childhood - it also deprives the child of other opportunities. It is not a merely neutral act; it is a choice. The book occasionally lists some superficial advantages of an overseas upbringing - interesting holidays, greater familiarity with world events - but Pollock and Van Reken seem to believe that a quiet life in an unchanging home community, with a constant culture, is the best and most natural option, and that if parents must make the choice to live overseas then they owe it to their children to recreate the closest possible approximation to that scenario as they can.
Pollock and Van Reken see no similarity at all between the expatriate ("third culture") experience and emigration. It's not clear why. It is true, as they say, that the expectation of ultimately returning "home" makes the overseas experience different. But in real life the division is not a neat one. Some people go, intending to stay for a short time but in fact remaining away indefinitely. Others intend to emigrate but, for whatever reason, eventually return to the home country. Others have open ended plans.
So, for example, Pollock and Van Reken write that "schooling should not make it impossible for the child to return to the home country". There is something in that, and it is certainly an issue for parents to consider. But parents are always seeking what is best for their children, and at times that has involved emigration and a change of education or language that may make it impossible to go back. At certain times in history the majority of the population of the US has consisted of recent immigrants or their immediate descendents, who could never go back. Were those people wrong to remove their children from their homeland for what they thought and hoped was a better life? Are parents who give their children a life overseas for a while really wrong to do so? Pollock and Van Reken effectively define it as wrong by a slippery three-step logic. First, they adopt the unstated assumption that belonging to a single culture is a primary good, better than any alternative. Second, they decree that a child who lives overseas belongs neither to the home culture nor the host culture, but to a "third culture". And third, they define that culture by omission as empty.
If parents give their children an education that opens the doors of Harvard, Oxford or the Sorbonne - or all of them - should we grieve too much that they no longer have the right prerequisites for entry to the University of Queensland?
One thing you won't find in this book is any advice for the "Third Culture Kids" themselves. One might have thought that the authors would have a few suggestions for the 15 or 16 year old TCK who finds the book on his or her parents' bookshelves and picks it up. But there is nothing. No suggestion that teenage children, as they move towards adulthood, should star taking responsibility for their own cultural adaptation: it is all up to the parents and their employers. On the other hand, there are some strange expressions of sympathy for teenagers who commit "youthful indiscretions" such as graffiti or other vandalism, which might have more onerous consequences in a foreign country than at home. It would appear the authors come from a culture where damaging other people's property is a normal part of growing up (but taking some responsibility for your own emotional development is not), and the rest of the world should just get used to that and accept it.
Ultimately, Pollock and Van Reken have little of interest to say about the TCK experience. Some TCKs grow up unusually shy; some are unusually extroverted. Gee whiz, just like everyone else. Some cling to stability whenever they can find it; others are reluctant to make long-term commitments (isn't there another genre of self-help literature about how some other group won't make long-term commitments? What was it again? Oh yes, men - that's right, 50% of the population). We're expected to sympathize with an 18 year old who was upset when her parents threw out their old cracked dinner plates on an inter-country move instead of treasuring them forever as "sacred objects". And, most ludicrous of all, with the difficulties faced by children who have to deal with differences between British and American spellings ("color" versus "colour", for example).
If you are a parent who is currently dealing with issues from a move or planned move overseas, think very carefully before you read this book. There are some things that, at certain vulnerable times of your life, aren't helpful. If you are struggling with your religious faith (and want to keep it), probably better not to read Nietzsche just now. If you're trying to give up cigarettes, a night out drinking with your friends who are still smokers might not be the best thing to do. If you are trying to avoid the temptation of casual sex or an affair, there are probably certain bars or parties that it's better not to go to. Van Reken wants you to know that her parents blighted her life by living overseas, and to make you feel guilty for doing the same thing. If you do read the book, be on your guard against the authors' particular brand of emotional blackmail before you pick it up.
 BRAT culture search November 17, 2008
Still reading this RARE topical find. It is mostly about people who grew up as kids or "brats" around the world -- State Dept., etc. There are certainly big paralells, ideas that applied to us military people who grew up around the country and world. I'm still on the hunt for a modern day publication that addresses US specifically -- growing up on post/base, in the environment, with the military culture and then the cut away from it, the adjustment, the lack of support because we're "used to be's" for services but "once a brat always a brat" inside. It would be great, a God send, to find a resource such as this for which I am searching. Closest read I've found yet. BIRTH ARMY TO ARMY TO LOCAL NAT'L/MILITARY TO ARMY CIV TO AIR FORCE TO civilian non military: "out here". M. Donnan
Married to a third culture kid? November 5, 2008
This book is so helpful for anyone married to a third culture kid - or contemplating it. It provides great insight to help understand a very different world view. Congratulations to the authors.
Best on Topic April 21, 2008
I think this is the best book written on the topic of third culture kids. The book is insightful and answers questions that are just under the surface for both kids and those who love them.
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