As I get to the end of the year, I wanted to post some book reviews in advance of posting a best of 2020 reading post.
A really helpful book I read this year was Raising Up a Generation of healthy Third Culture Kids by Lauren Wells. The last 7 1/2 years we’ve raised our kids overseas so they’ve lived from half to 75% of their lives overseas depending on their age when we first moved. As we go back and forth between worlds, the third culture dynamics are pretty evident and we’re mindful of some of how their life experience is shaping identity.
Due to the pandemic, we returned to the United States a couple of months ago. There are so many moments that have really reinforced the third culture realities – from the insecurity of how to relate in one’s country of origin, to unfamiliarity with some typical holiday traditions, or the difficulty of feeling in between worlds and not knowing where one fits. The pandemic has reinforced the displacement even more and isolation taps into the belonging challenges.
This book provides a helpful overview of third culture issues, but it’s coming at it from the vantage point of parenting and helping parents assess what is happening at different points of a third culture child’s development and help explore interventions or pathways of intentionality to mitigate some of the long term risks for third culture kids.
We frequently hear things like “kids are so resilient” and that our kids will be so much better for what their experience is overseas. Some of those are well-intentioned statements and there are kernels or elements of truth in it. However, I appreciate this book because it honestly lays out the challenges and risks for third culture kids in later adulthood. Frankly – not all third culture kids are “better for it” and there are real risks involved as far as emotional, identity, and spiritual development. There are potential great gains as well, but there are real risks that demand reflection, awareness, and intentionality.
We know our kids will have their own journeys. We have made choices that will affect them for the rest of their lives – including some positive things as well as some very negative or challenging things. We wrestle with parental guilt sometimes because we’re very in touch with what our kids don’t experience and some of the challenging things they have to face that they wouldn’t have if we had stayed put. The book provides a balanced perspective of both the positive possibilities for third culture kids in what they can bring to their relationships and the world in their lives as well as some of the real things that require resilience and intentionality and how unhealthy dynamics can very easily translate to difficulty in adulthood.
It’s a great resource for us at this stage of our lives. A lot in there wasn’t new because of the number of things we’ve read, but it affirmed some of the things we’ve tried to do and it helped us be mindful of a few other areas to be more intentional about with our kids.
The chapters on identity formation and grieving were stand-out chapters to me and there were really helpful perspectives throughout on how to help provide networks of support in both the country of origin and the country of residency.
If you’re raising kids overseas or in situations where kids are immersed heavily in a different culture than one’s culture of origin, I’d recommend this one – really practical with a lot of solid research and perspective for the big picture of what third culture kids go through.
