Category: Tanya Crossman

TCKs and the Balancing Act of Achievement

On a Wednesday afternoon we drove into the campsite and settled on a hill overlooking a beautiful river in central Taiwan. The slopes were covered with greenery — trees, bamboo, flowers — and various birdcalls echoed around us. 

Three buses disgorged nearly a hundred grade 12 students from three campuses around the island. I was the guest speaker for their Senior Retreat — a time to consider the big upcoming transition as they prepared to complete high school and (in most cases) begin military service and/or leave the country for university studies.

In my sessions, we discussed practical preparations before leaving, how to process our emotions on either side of the Big Change, even how different it can be to build relationships (and date!) in a new culture. There was one topic which held their attention more than any other. So much eye contact, intensity, and notetaking. And it was first thing on Friday morning, when many of them were tired!

The topic? Failure.

“I Have to be Perfect”

Over the past twenty years of working with TCKs, this topic has come up repeatedly. Fear of failure showed up even among those with parents and teachers who were very loving and supportive, who did not put high expectations on them. 

In conversation and interviews TCKs said, “I have to be perfect!” I would ask them, “Who told you that?” 

In most cases, what followed was several moments of silence, perhaps a cocked head, as they reached through memory and often responded, “Actually, I can’t remember anyone saying that exactly”

In some cases there was a verbally expressed expectation for their behaviour. People knew them, knew their parents, knew about their parents’ work. The way they acted in public reflected on others. It mattered.

In my book Misunderstood I described it this way:

Many TCKs I interviewed felt they had no space to fail, internalising a pressure to live up to the standards of their parents’ occupations. Foreign service and MKs were most likely to make these comments; several had been told outright, often in a serious sit-down talk, that their actions had repercussions for others — reflecting negatively or positively on their parents, their country, or even their God.

Many TCKs, whether this is said directly to them or not, carry a weight of responsibility to be good representatives of their parents’ cause. 

Many MKs feel this both while living abroad, among a people their family desires to witness to, and while visiting their passport country, as they are presented to sponsoring churches — and feel the pressure to perform for the people who pay for their family’s way of life.

In TCK Training’s 2024 survey of over 1,000 missionary kids,

  • 54% of missionary kids felt “pressure to be perfect” while living abroad
  • 69% of missionary kids felt “pressure to perform” while visiting their passport country

Warped Sense of Normal

The other big issue is that most TCKs grow up with a warped sense of normal. That is, they compare themselves to elite achievement — then decide they must be failing, or at least falling behind. 

80% of MKs grew up with at least one parent who held an advanced degree. Compare that to how many adults in the world hold any degree at all! (That’s about 20-30% in the Western world.)

About 95% of TCKs take at least some university classes. The highest numbers I could find worldwide for university entrance were in the USA, pre-covid, where 60% of high school graduates did at least some university study. And that’s just those who completed high school. It doesn’t count those who previously dropped out.

I’ve been to many international school graduations, and typically about one third of students have a cord/sash or other indicator to publicly display that they attained a straight A average. 

None of this is ‘normal’ anywhere in the world. But this is the ‘normal’ our MKs grow up with. This is the set of expectations they assume they must live up to. When they excel, they see that as expected — not something to celebrate.

Instead of celebrating their successes, many TCKs instead breathe a sigh of relief. They didn’t fail. This time. But soon enough, there’s another potential future failure to fear. 

Lessons about Failure

All this explains why, on that warm pre-storm morning in central Taiwan, nearly one hundred students watched me intently as I began to explain that the way so many of them felt inside — that pressure to excel, that fear of failure — was a common experience. That it was not a personal failing. And most important, that there was a way through it.

I shared two important lessons with them.

1) Failure is a stepping stone to success.

Ask anyone who has succeeded in their field, and they’ll tell you about the litany of failures on the way to their eventual success. No one gets it right the first time. And even if they did, that’s not how you learn. We learn far more from failure than we do from success.

Perhaps this seems obvious to you. But I guarantee, for most young TCKs this concept is a revelation!

2) Failure shows you who cares.

So many TCKs spend their lives trying to be good enough, trying to live up to something, with the unspoken belief that when they get it wrong, relationship will be negatively impacted.

And so I tell them. It is when we fail, when we get things wrong, when we show our human weakness — those are the times we see the depth of genuine relationship in our lives. That’s when we see who loves us for who we are, not for our performance. 

How Can Adults Help?

TCKs need to hear us talk about our mistakes, our failures, and our weaknesses. They need to know that we don’t have it all together — and that we never did.

They need models of getting it wrong, picking yourself up and trying again, and learning through the process. They need to know that they are loved and cared for even when everything goes wrong. We can’t assume they know these things. We need to say it out loud. 

We need to say, “You are more important to me than your grades.” 

We need to say, “I’ve failed so many times. It’s hard, but I got through it.”

We need to say, “I’m not perfect, and I don’t expect you to be.”

Many of the solutions I propose in this article seem simple, especially considering the magnitude of the problem. But that’s the point! There are lots of little things we can do that make a big difference for the TCKs in our lives. And now that we know how much these things matter, it’s time to start being intentional about doing them.

Finally, Proof That Kids Can Thrive While Growing Up Overseas

Last month marked twenty years since I started working with TCKs and globally mobile families. I have always believed that international life is a great experience and that we all gain so much from it — no matter how young (or old) we are.

Yet through the years I have met a lot of young people who experienced a lot of pain during and following their international years. I have spent a lot of time listening to them and their stories, too. I joined TCK Training because I believe so much in the mission of preventive care: that there are practical things we can do to help families thrive through international transitions. 

Now, we have the research to prove it.

Preventive Care That Works

The field of preventive science is relatively new. While research into Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) has been going on for nearly 30 years, research into Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) isn’t even 10 years old.

Last year, TCK Training surveyed over 1,600 Adult TCKs about their childhood experiences — both the hard things and the resilience-building factors. In September, we released findings on how both ACEs and PCEs impact long-term wellness for TCKs. The biggest takeaway was that 5-7 PCEs dramatically improve long-term outcomes for TCKs, whether or not they experienced childhood trauma.

There are several different studies measuring different protective factors. We modeled our research after Bethell et al’s 2019 study with seven Positive Childhood Experiences. We asked TCKs seven questions, and each time they answered ‘true’ or ‘mostly true’ they received a score of 1, leading to a total score of 0-7. 

  1. I felt safe/accepted when talking about my feelings with my family.
  2. I felt my family stood by me during difficult times.
  3. An adult in my home made me feel safe and protected.
  4. I felt supported by friends.
  5. I felt a sense of belonging during my high school years (around age 14-18).
  6. I engaged in community traditions I enjoyed. (These might include religious festivals, national holidays, school events, or annual gatherings.)
  7. I always had at least two adults in my life who genuinely cared about me (not including my parents).

The difference in long-term outcomes for TCKs with all seven PCEs vs TCKs with no PCEs was astounding. For example, TCKs with all 7 PCEs were:

  • 63% less likely to be diagnosed with anxiety
  • 72% less likely to abuse alcohol or use illicit drugs
  • 86% less likely to be diagnosed with PTSD
  • 2.1x more likely to say being a TCK was “the best way to grow up”
  • 5.4x more likely to say the TCK life was “wonderful, no regrets”

Yet this is only part of the story. High PCEs often come with low trauma. In order to really test whether PCEs were responsible for better outcomes, we divided our survey respondents into four groups. First we divided them into those with 0-4 PCEs and those with 5-7 PCEs; then we divided each of those groups by high/low trauma scores.

This meant we could look just at TCKs with high trauma, or just with low trauma, and see whether PCE scores made a difference within each group. Over and over, through dozens of different factors, high PCE scores made a difference for TCKs.

Even When Life Is Hard, Preventive Care Matters

We repeatedly saw that even when TCKs experienced trauma during childhood, those with higher PCE scores had better long term outcomes. For a TCK with 3 or more ACEs, also having 5-7 PCEs meant they were:

  • 38% less likely to smoke
  • 67% less likely to abuse prescription medication
  • 46% more likely to say that the TCK life was a good experience overall
  • 2x more likely to say living abroad made their family closer
  • 2.3x more likely to say the TCK life was “wonderful, no regrets”

Sometimes, the traumas that form an ACE score are hard for parents and caregivers to prevent. Bad things happen, even to good people, good families, and when everyone tries their best. For example, parents struggling with their own emotional or mental health during difficult international transitions are not always capable of parenting at their best, especially when solid support is in short supply. 

The good news is that protective factors are powerful — and many occur outside the home. Every family needs a village to provide additional support for their children, to create this protective shield against the difficulties of life.

Preventive Care Is for ALL Families

Yet preventive care is not just for those kids and families having a difficult time. Preventive care helps everyone! TCKs with 0-2 Adverse Childhood Experiences also benefited from the presence of Positive Childhood Experiences! Those with 5-7 PCEs were:

  • 38% less likely to abuse alcohol
  • 43% less likely to be diagnosed with a chronic illness
  • 44% less likely to experience suicidal ideation
  • 52% less likely to self harm
  • 63% less likely to have 25 or more sexual partners

The good news is that these protective factors make a difference in the lives of all TCKs, even when they are not experiencing childhood trauma. 

We Can All Make a Difference

Something that was clear across each group was the impact of PCEs on TCKs’ perception of their parents’ work abroad. If you’re anything like me, you’ve heard stories and read articles about missionary kids who felt let down by their parents’ work, by the missionary organisation they worked for, and even by God for sending their family to do such a hard thing. 

I think it is therefore really important to know that in our research, a TCK with all 7 PCEs was 2.2x more likely to be proud of their parents’ work abroad than a TCK with no PCEs. And whether they had low or high trauma scores, TCKs with 5 or more PCEs were 44% more likely to be proud of their parents’ work abroad. 

Part of caring for missionary families well is being the village they need to provide emotional support through life. Being the friends who form their community — sharing friendship, being ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ to their children, and celebrating traditions together. These things make a big difference in the lives of children growing up globally.

Learn more about the Protective Factors:

Free course on implementing PCEs

Read the free research report

Read the full research report

Watch the workshop explaining the research

Photo by Ryan Stefan on Unsplash

 

The Hidden Stresses of MKs Who Love Missions

Ormiston Gorge, Central Australia

I’m writing this from my sister’s dining table. Despite the depth of Australian winter, sun streams through the high windows, gradually moving across a beautiful original artwork by a local indigenous artist here in the central desert region of the country.

Over the past six weeks here I’ve leaned into my own artist heart by spending hours sitting in the beautiful red desert landscape, painting watercolours. If you’ve ever painted with watercolours yourself, you’ll know there is a lot of patience required. I paint a layer, wait for it to dry, then paint the next layer, slowly building a picture layer by layer, one colour at a time.

During this time as I’ve sat down at my computer, I’ve leaned into a different part of my heart, one with a different kind of artistry – data analysis. While research and data analysis may not sound as artistic, entrancing, and interesting to you as it does to me, it is something I am passionate about.

There is something akin to the patient layer-building of watercolour painting. The most interesting and important answers don’t come to light immediately. Yet as I filter and layer the huge amounts of data offered to us by the adult TCK community, pictures begin to emerge. In this post I am going to share with you just one of the pictures emerging over the last few months.

Surveying TCK Experiences 

In our cumulative decades of work with TCKs, we’ve heard some things repeated time and time again — opinions about their parents, opinions about their childhood, joys and struggles. When we developed our latest survey, we drew on that experience to see how widely certain sentiments were shared. 

Among them, we offered four key statements related to a sense of identity with parents’ work:

  1. “That I belonged to something greater than myself (identified with their work/purpose)”
  2. “Proud of my parent’s work”
  3. “Desire to ‘follow in their footsteps’ in some way when I grew up”
  4. “Indifferent to my parent’s occupation abroad (no different to anywhere else)”

We also offered four key statements around various stressors related to their experiences living overseas during childhood:

  1. “Pressure to be ‘perfect’ as my behavior reflected on my parent’s employer”
  2. “Anxiety as a result of duties assigned to me (i.e. tour guide, translator)”
  3. “Pressure to ‘perform’ while visiting our passport country”
  4. “Worry that misbehavior on my part might result in our family having to leave the country”

From this we had some wonderful initial stats, and some troubling initial stats – all of which we shared in our First Look research report. With more analysis over time, deeper connections led to a discernible pattern: groups who identified strongly with their parents’ work and purpose abroad also carried higher levels of stress, anxiety and/or pressure connected to it.

Similarly, the more indifferent a group was to their parents’ occupation abroad, the less likely they were to experience these pressures. For example, TCKs who grew up in corporate families were far less likely to express a sense of connection to their parents’ employment; in fact, nearly half said they were “indifferent” to their parents’ work, and only 16% felt a sense of belonging/purpose connected to it. Yet corporate TCKs were also far less likely to feel the various pressures listed above. “There seemed to be benefits to this ‘disconnect’ from parents’ occupation” (Corporate Adult TCKs & Mental Health: First Look at the 2024 Research).

What This Means for Missionary Families

This pattern is crucial when we talk about missionary kids. Missionary kids expressed a really strong connection to their parents’ work abroad – something most of us want to see and encourage! Three quarters of missionary kids felt proud of their parents’ work, and they also identified with the sense of purpose it created; more than half wanted to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Only 10% of missionary kids said they were “indifferent” to their parents’ work (Adult Missionary Kids & Mental Health: First Look at the 2024 Research). These are statistics to make hearts that love missions and missionary families leap for joy.

And yet.

More than half of missionary kids felt pressure to be ‘perfect’ while living abroad (compared to a quarter of corporate TCKs).

Even more missionary kids felt pressure to “perform” when they visited their passport countries. More than any other sector of TCKs – in fact, more than twice as likely than most other sectors, including corporate TCKs.

Why does this happen?

Let’s think about one missionary kid, rather than the huge group who contributed to this survey. Think of a child or teenager who is very proud of the missionary work their parents do. They feel their whole family is involved in this work, and so they feel a sense of connection, of being part of this work, and derive a sense of purpose from being in this overseas country in order to do this work. 

Because of their emotional investment in this work, they will naturally develop a sense of responsibility for the work. They want to do what they can do to help. But what does that mean, when their day looks like going to school and being part of the community? Perhaps they even ask their parents how they might contribute. And their parents let them know that simply living their everyday lives as witnesses is powerful. 

Because children can easily extrapolate concepts well beyond what well-meaning adults intended, soon we have a child who has internalised the idea that everything they say and do in public impacts the work their parents – their whole family – is doing. Slowly, they feel a burden of responsibility that goes beyond the everyday witness their parents intended.

Or perhaps think of a child who enjoys their life overseas but suddenly finds themself in their passport country for home assignment. Every weekend they stand in front of a new group of strangers (some of whom call them by name and act like they know everything their family does) and perform stories or songs of what they do in the “foreign country” that is the only home they know. They field odd questions, talk about daily routines to laughter and astonishment, and throughout it all make sure to smile brightly because they realise at least on some level that their family’s livelihood depends on these people who know nothing about their life.

A child who on the outside seems to be invested in the mission and well behaved may be carrying a heavy burden of stress on the inside.

Leaning in with Intentional Care

Praising the benefits of missionary life without acknowledging the difficulties does missionary families and missionary kids a disservice. The picture emerging from the data is that these two sides of missionary kid life are connected.  Understanding that this connection exists allows us to be intentional about providing targeted preventive care that supports missionary kids and their families.

A Life Overseas is a great repository of resources for missionaries, member carers, and supporting churches. This includes a range of articles that acknowledge potential pitfalls in seeing missionary kids as extensions of their missionary parents. Three great examples of this are My Kids are Not Little Missionaries, 3 Ways to Care for the Heart of Your Missionary Kid and Don’t Call Your Kids World Changers. 

Another way to help MKs with internalized pressures is by asking great questions to facilitate open and honest communication. A Life Overseas also has some great posts with suggestions for questions to ask TCKs – whether you are a parent, a caregiver, or a supporter in a church lobby! These include: 10 Questions to Routinely Ask Your TCKs, 10 Questions Missionary Kids Would Love to be Asked, and Questions Third Culture Kids and Their Parents Love.

Of course, we always recommend learning about Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) and their proven relationship to long-term wellness. TCK Training offers a free video miniseries on PCEs designed to help parents implement these fundamentals intentionally in a globally mobile life. 

Meanwhile, I continue to paint – with watercolours and with data – as I complete a few projects that mean the world to me. I’ve been teaching my nine-year-old niece to paint watercolours, while painting a local ring-necked parrot she ‘commissioned’ from me.

And after months of painstakingly layering data analysis, I have completed new research on Protective Factors that Improve Long Term Wellness in TCKs (launching September 16th, 2025). You may not be a painter, but I hope you enjoy the picture painted in this research report. It provides joy and hope for all of us caring for the hearts of TCKs around the world.

Hearing the Good and the Hard of Missionary Kid Lives

I have been working in TCK research for over ten years. That includes six large scale surveys (with 200-2000 responses) and over 600 interviews. The data I’m currently analysing comes from TCK Training’s 2024 survey of 1,643 TCKs around the world. It was a long survey covering a lot of topics and I wish I could spend ten hours a day delving into the details! For now, the initial data on missionary kids has a lot to say about their experiences. (The full First Look data drop is available paywall free.) 

In this post I will share with you four key things we learned about missionary kids (MKs) through the research:

  1. Most missionary kids are glad they grew up abroad.
  2. Good things and hard things are often intertwined.
  3. Missionary kids feel a lot of pressure.
  4. Emotional support and mental health are key.

1) Most missionary kids are glad they grew up abroad. 

Throughout my research I have learned many hopeful things about how TCKs perceive their globally mobile childhoods. The vast majority have positive things to say about their experiences, even though they may in the same breath acknowledge that there were also difficulties. In this latest research we learned:

  • 91% of MKs said growing up abroad was a good experience overall.
  • 76% of MKs said it made their family closer.
  • 72% of MKs said it was “the best way to grow up.”

2) Good things and hard things are often intertwined.

Life is rarely black and white. To truly understand the lives of missionary kids, we must hear the nuance in their stories — that there were hard things along with the good things. Even many MKs who had the most difficult experiences of childhood also saw positives in their upbringing.

  • 98% of MKs said, “I can see both good parts and hard parts in my story.”
  • 96% of MKs said, “There were hard times, but it enriched my life.”
  • 83% of MKs said, “I enjoyed my childhood, but I think some things could have been handled better.”
  • And only 7% of MKs said living abroad “ruined my life.”

3) Missionary kids feel a lot of pressure.

When TCK Training asked TCKs about various childhood experiences connected to their parents’ work, we found that missionary kids were much more likely to feel certain pressures when they were children.

  • 69% of MKs felt “pressure to ‘perform’ while visiting our passport country”; they were twice as likely as other TCKs to feel this pressure.
  • 54% of MKs felt “pressure to be ‘perfect’ as my behavior reflected on my parent’s employer.”
  • 27% of MKs said that as children they felt “anxiety as a result of duties assigned to me (i.e. tour guide, translator)”; they were twice as likely as other TCKs to feel this anxiety.

Through my interviews I have also learned that many missionary kids try to hide their stress from their parents, as they do not want to cause additional burden to their parents. They love their parents and recognise the strain they already carry. 

4) Emotional support and mental health are key.

While those of us working to support missionary kids have long seen impacts on their mental health, when the results came in, the numbers were still heavy. 

  • During childhood, 37% of MKs lived with someone who had a serious mental health crisis.
  • 34% of MKs reported experiencing a serious mental health crisis themselves during childhood.
  • 40% of MKs had been diagnosed with a mental illness during their lifetime.
  • 86% of MKs experienced symptoms of at least one mental health concern during their lifetime.

We’re also seeing that missionary kids are less likely to receive diagnoses than other TCKs. For example, while 47% of MKs experienced symptoms of PTSD, only 12% received a diagnosis (which is still nearly double the rate of PTSD diagnosis in the US population). 

Missionary kids are experiencing the impact of not only their own mental health struggles, but the struggles of their parents. One thing I’ve seen over and over through our research and working with thousands of TCKs and their families around the world is that when parents are doing well, they have the energy and capacity to care for their kids better. So not only do the TCKs need access to quality mental health support, but getting the parents this kind of support is crucial!  

There are a range of issues contributing to a lack of mental healthcare for missionary families. Many families lack access to quality mental health services due to a remote location, financial stress, frequent mobility, language access, or a combination of these factors. 

Stigma around mental health can also play a role in preventing MKs (and their parents) reaching out for the support they need. It is important that we talk openly about mental health and the ways we benefit from getting support.

Prevention Matters

The saying “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” (attributed to Benjamin Franklin) is appropriate here. I believe this data demonstrates the importance of preventive care for MKs and missionary families. My hope and desire is that we support families in such a way that we see rates of mental health concerns drop over time, and MKs flourish — on the field and throughout their lives.

One of the many reasons I love my work at TCK Training is that we believe that international life is a good thing and that it can go hand in hand with a healthy family life. We work to create quality preventive care resources, and we share our research freely because we believe quality research is a critical component of exceptional TCK care. We want caregivers, parents, and supporting churches alike to be equipped to care for TCKs well! 

 

This article expands on data shared in “Key Takeaways for TCKs” in Mission Frontiers, May/June 2025.

Photo by Kasturi Laxmi Mohit on Unsplash

The Truly International Scope of the TCK World

If you’ve spent much time around A Life Overseas, you probably know that Third Culture Kids (TCKs) spend at least part of their growing up years living outside their passport countries, expecting a return ‘home’ to a country at least somewhat foreign to them.

When you picture TCKs, what do you see? Who do you imagine? An American missionary kid living in Africa, or Asia?That child is certainly a TCK. So is the Cameroonian daughter of a UN employee growing up in Tanzania, the Singaporean businessman’s son growing up in Thailand, and the children of a Brazilian missionary growing up in Lebanon. Each one of these examples resembles a TCK I know.

TCKs don’t just grow up around the world. TCKs are from every country in the world!

Seeing the Diversity of TCKs

I first learned about the TCK world in the context of a large international church, where families from over 70 countries met together each week for worship. It was ten years after my own teenage repatriation.

The young people in the youth group where I volunteered came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were missionary kids, while others had parents in the diplomat corps, the military, or multinational businesses. Still other parents worked in international schools, local universities, or ran their own businesses.

When we ran youth camps (and had to register with the local police), I would carry a stack of 100+ passports to the administration office of the conference centre to fill in paperwork. I knew TCKs from Brazil, Burundi, China, DR Congo, Finland, France, Germany, Guatemala, Guyana, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Zambia, and many more nations. (Incidentally, the paperwork process also helped me learn the Chinese names for many nations!)

One of my favourite parts of my first book, Misunderstood, is near the back. There is an appendix called “Global Contributions” which lists all the countries that the 270 TCKs I interviewed and the 750 TCKs I surveyed came from and lived in. The 165 territories listed include 153 of the 193 UN member nations. My TCK cohort came from 86 different passport countries. The first section of the book is short, but it quotes eight TCKs bearing eight nationalities: Australia, China, Indonesia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK, the USA, and Zambia.

Listening to the Stories of TCKs

It is so important to hear the stories of TCKs, including missionary kids, who live very different lives than what we might normally associate with the ‘picture’ of a TCK. They have important things to bring to the TCK table. 

Through the years I’ve continued to listen, and learn, from more stories.

I’ve learned from the stories of missionary kids growing up in indigenous communities in their own passport countries (in Brazil and Australia) about the great cultural and linguistic differences they face within their own borders. 

I’ve learned from the stories of Indian and Nigerian missionary kids at ‘home’, where moving to a new state can mean the community has a different language, a different religion, a different culture — and different expectations to go along with each. Places where your name can mark you as different and not belonging, all without ever leaving your passport country.

I’ve learned from the stories of Chinese missionary kids living in the Middle East and Central Asia, stuck between languages and cultures, without access to other TCKs, living vicariously through the internet. 

I’ve learned from the stories of Brazilian missionary kids, changing countries and school years mid-year (something an Aussie TCK like me can commiserate with), always pushed back but never moved forward due to language barriers and curriculum changes. Many ended up finishing high school at age 20. Others were left either without the curriculum capacity to attend university in Brazil or the finances to study elsewhere. 

I’ve learned from the stories of missionary kids growing up on ministry ships that travel the globe. These TCKs often have parents from different countries and/or cultures, and they may even have been born during a stop along the way. They build their own international culture on board ship as they travel. Finding a sense of belonging in any single culture can leave them feeling out of their depth. 

I’ve learned that my experience as an Australian TCK going to an American school in the USA resonates with a lot of South American TCKs going to local schools in different Spanish-speaking countries, Taiwanese TCKs going to school in mainland China, and African TCKs going to school in a neighbouring country that, while also English-speaking or Francophone, was culturally very different.  

Hearing Global Voices

When voices that have similar or parallel experiences to our own are easy to find, we must put in effort to find the voices that are different. That effort is so worth it! While a lot of TCK literature and conversation comes from primarily western voices, with primarily white and English-speaking backgrounds, there is a much wider variety to tap into. Here are some suggestions if you want to listen to more stories:

The Round Trip Stories podcast is currently doing a season on Third Culture Kids and has TCKs from a range of backgrounds sharing their stories.

The Living With No Roots podcast is hosted by an Ivorian/Congolese TCK who grew up in Lebanon. Interesting reflections as well as some guests who share their own stories.

Talks with a TCK Friend is a podcast hosted by a Filipino TCK who has hosted a range of TCKs from different backgrounds for conversations about their experiences.

The Global Chatter podcast shares stories from TCKs and expats all over the world with a very diverse set of experiences.

Some older podcasts (no longer updating) also hold treasures of stories for those who want to listen. Some of these include TCK Tales podcast, Third Culture podcast, Barely African podcast, When Life Gives You Calamansi podcast, and Third Culture Stories (which captures the TCKs of Asia forums).

There are also books written by TCKs from non-western backgrounds, and there is much we can learn from their insights. These include Girl Uprooted by Lena Lee, The Third Culture Teen by Jiwon Lee, and Tales of a Diplomat’s Daughter by Marie Suazo.

I always have my ears open to listen to more stories, so please share your own suggestions for us in the comments!

Coming soon…

As a researcher, I believe another important way to hear TCKs’ voices is through quantitative research. In my role as TCK Training’s research director, I am currently neck deep in data analysis following our latest survey. I was delighted to find 93 passport countries represented amongst our survey’s 1,643 respondents. We have enough variety in responses to compare responses between TCKs from USA/Canada, the other Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia/NZ. I am so excited for what we will learn as we listen to these voices! Stay tuned for the first major drop of data in early 2025.

 

Photo by Atikh Bana on Unsplash

 

Research and Resources for Improving TCKs’ Mental Health

When my book Misunderstood was published, I was immediately asked if/when I would write another book. At the time I felt I had nothing left to write. I’d put everything into those pages. Yet within a year a new idea started to form: a guidebook for Adult TCKs, showing that they are not alone in their struggles and sharing strategies for moving forward in healthy ways.

Since 2018 I have been doing both qualitative and quantitative research in aid of this project. It has been paused for multiple major medical issues and an incredibly disruptive unplanned pandemic relocation, among other reasons. During that time some wonderful resources for Adult TCKs have been released, which I regularly recommend. (These include Incredible Lives and the Courage to Live Them by Dr Rachel Cason, Belonging Beyond Borders by Megan Norton, and Girl Uprooted by Lena Lee).

Yet the dream of my wide-ranging guidebook persists. I have about 200 hours of interview recordings with 120 Adult TCKs from a variety of backgrounds, plus a survey with data I am starting to analyse. 

The survey was originally intended as a quick effort to guide my research by distinguishing which topics Adult TCKs thought were the most important to talk about. Due to my medical issues, I left it open far longer than originally intended, and it attracted over 800 complete responses. Not only that, but with such a large pool of responses from Adult TCKs of different ages, I learned some really interesting information as well. (You can find the survey information and data analysis here.)

In this post I share a few key things learned about ATCKs’ mental health, plus resources for supporting TCKs and their families.

Unresolved Grief

3 out of every 5 ATCKs said their adult lives were impacted by unresolved grief. Another 1 in 5 said their adult lives were ‘sometimes’ impacted by unresolved grief. 

While this won’t come as a surprise to anyone working with TCKs on a regular basis, it’s still a huge number. 80% of TCKs are impacted as adults by grief they haven’t processed effectively. This underlines the importance of giving TCKs of all ages (from young children through to adults) the tools to express their emotions, feel their feelings, and unstack their grief towers. 

I am so grateful that there are now excellent grief processing resources I can recommend for every age and stage! 

For young children, the picture book My Tower is Tumbling. 

For parents of children from toddlers to teens, the short book The Grief Tower, available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook, and the workshop Unstacking Your TCK’s Grief Tower. 

For both teen and Adult TCKs, Unstacking Sessions with an ATCK coach can be great. 

For Adult TCKs working through this themselves, there’s the short book Unstacking Your Grief Tower (ebook and paperback) and the Unstacking Your Grief Tower Self-Guided Course. 

For parents and caregivers who want to learn to support others, as well as ATCKs themselves, the workshops Grief Tower 101 and 201. 

For anyone at all (TCK or not), What Made That Feel So Hard? (ebook and paperback), which also has a Bible Study guide.

Depression and Anxiety

Half of the ATCKs who took my survey said their adult lives were impacted by depression, and in a separate question half said their adult lives were impacted by anxiety. Another 20% said their adult lives were ‘sometimes’ impacted by depression, and 20% ‘sometimes’ impacted by anxiety. 

This is by no means a scientifically rigorous study, but the fact that so many ATCKs feel that depression and anxiety have played a significant role in their lives should give us pause. Those of us working with TCKs have seen this anecdotally, though it can be hard to know if what you see in your work is true of the wider community or not – which is where large-scale surveys can be helpful. 

TCK Training has a whole section of resources specifically for Adult TCKs, and among the workshops available is one on Understanding Depression as an ATCK and another on Understanding Your Anxiety as an ATCK. 

For caregivers working with TCKs, there is also an annual Counseling TCKs Therapist Training (with 6 CE hours from the NBCC). The next one is coming up soon — on August 28th, 2024!

What do we do with this?

My little tester survey was never intended to be used as much more than a guide to show what needs our attention. These numbers definitely point to the importance of investigating what is happening with the mental health of Adult TCKs.

This is part of why I am so thankful for my work at TCK Training, where I am the Director of Research and International Education. We are currently collecting responses in a wide-ranging survey of Adult TCKs which includes questions about mental health experiences (both screening questions and questions about medical diagnoses) vetted by licensed psychologists and counsellors familiar with TCKs. 

So far there are 1,300 complete responses from ATCKs who are citizens of 85 countries. We would love to hear from even more Adult TCKs, so please check out the survey information to learn more and pass it on to others. The survey closes on August 31st – not much time left!

As with all our research, the analysis of this new research will be freely available with no paywall. You can read findings from our previous research and learn the latest as it appears on our research page. By the end of 2024, we should have more detailed data on the experiences of depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions in the TCK community. We believe that this data will help us as a community to better support families as they raise children abroad and to better support Adult TCKs as they move forward – no matter what their childhood experiences were.

 

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Accessing the Power of Good Debriefing

A colleague of mine at TCK Training spent time preparing and travelling to facilitate a two-day debrief with a family who were on home assignment in their passport country. As they all introduced themselves and began to get to know each other, she asked what their hopes were for their time together over the next two days. The parents looked at each other and then back at her as they sheepishly admitted, “Actually, we have no idea. This is something our organisation requires, so we just signed up because we were supposed to. We have no clue what a debrief actually involves.” 

While debriefing has grown in popularity and more missionaries are at least familiar with the concept, the actual nuts and bolts of a debrief can be a bit murky. Because of that, it can be hard to even know, “What is a good debrief?” What should your expectation be of the debrief you signed up for? How do you know a debrief went “well”? 

As we’ve worked with hundreds of families at TCK Training, we’ve heard about a wide array of debrief experiences. There’s a vast mixture in what they received and how effective it was. We would love to see a broader understanding of the hallmarks of a good debrief, even if the execution differs.

In this article I am going to explore what a good debrief involves, why good debriefing can be so powerful, and how to access quality debriefing – no matter what services are (or are not) made available to you in your own situation.

Q: What is a good debrief?

1) A good debrief is preventive. 

That is, the debrief is not in response to a crisis situation but is part of a program of regular care. At TCK Training, we recommend that all families experiencing global mobility do a full debrief (two full days set aside for the sole purpose of debriefing the entire family) every 3-4 years and a check-in style “annual debrief” each year in between. While crisis situations also need to be addressed, this should not be the only situation in which a debrief occurs.

2) A good debrief crafts an intentional, open-ended journey.

Good debriefing is more than verbal processing, prompted with questions along the lines of “Tell me what happened? How did it go? What happened next?” A good debrief instead asks about all different facets of life, and is open to unexpected answers, not just looking to check items off a list. A good debrief asks intentional and purposeful questions that are crafted to lead you and your TCKs through a journey of discovery, finding things that need processing – even if you weren’t consciously aware of them.

For children, this element of a good debrief involves engaging in a variety of ways. Since we all know that sitting across from a child and asking them direct questions isn’t particularly effective, we need to make sure that movement and creativity are a central part of a TCK debrief. 

3) A good debrief creates a sacred space for hard things.

During a good debrief, you feel safe to explore difficult experiences and the difficult emotions that go with them. You are not shamed for your emotions, worried that your emotions might be used against you, or that what you share might result in you losing your job. In the sacred space of a good debrief, you know there are no “right” or “wrong” answers. 

4) A good debrief embraces both shared and individual experiences.

At TCK Training we believe in the power of families working through debrief materials together. We all have shared experiences as a family, and it is helpful and healing to process those shared experiences together. During the debrief, parents get the opportunity to model expressing hard feelings and doing the hard work of emotional processing, with expert guidance to support them. As their children watch this, it will help them recognize the importance of this work and how to do it, as well as give them permission to do this work with their parents, not only in the moment but in the future.

In addition, there will always be aspects of our lives as a family that are individual. Children and parents do not have the same experiences, nor does each child or each parent have the same experiences. Having individual sessions as well as family sessions is necessary to build self-awareness and for personal growth.

Q: Why is a good debrief powerful?

Making debriefs part of a regular program of preventive care leads to more beneficial outcomes. Reactive care – a debrief that takes place in the aftermath of a particularly stressful event – occurs when individuals are full of heightened and heavy emotions and aren’t able to fully engage in the debriefing process. During a preventive care-style debrief, individuals are less occupied with a specific need and can engage in the process of working through all the small things they have experienced over time. This leads to greater learning about themselves and their needs and greater likelihood of retaining that learning over time. 

As part of an individual debrief, teenagers and adults alike get the opportunity to work through their experiences with guided assistance. The crafted questions of a good debrief help us recognise things we didn’t even know were hiding under the surface of our hearts and minds. We debrief our emotions, identity, grief and loss, subconscious expectations, and more. 

Debriefing as a family helps us see where these different facts do and do not line up with each other – where we have different perspectives on the same events. Children are provided a safe space and a mediated opportunity to share emotions they have struggled to express. Parents can help fill in the gaps where children were missing part of the story. These can be powerful family moments.

One Adult TCK shared with me that as a child, their missionary family had something called a “debrief” every four years through their parents’ missionary agency while on home assignment. Yet this experience never included anything individual for them as a child or teenager, where they could explore their feelings. In addition, they felt constrained to not speak about certain events. A debrief that created sacred space and acknowledged their individual journey would have been far more powerful. It would have combatted the loneliness far too many TCKs struggle with and instilled the value that they are worth being individually cared for.

Q: How can our family access a quality debrief? 

If your organisation offers (or requires) a debrief, try to get some information about what debrief means to them. You might ask what the debrief consists of, how children are involved, what the goals/aims of the debrief are, and how the debriefers are trained. 

If your organisation does not provide debriefing, or the debriefing offered is not comprehensive, you could ask them to outsource these services to another organisation or to cover the cost of your family procuring a debrief elsewhere. Knowing what a good debrief is and why it matters will help in explaining why this is important to you.

Our priority at TCK Training is ensuring that families have access to quality debriefing, both inside and outside the missionary world, and we are not the only group with this goal. Other sources of quality debriefs include MTI (Mission Training International), Alongside Ministries, TRAIN, and Safe Place Ministry. 

TCK Training provides debriefing services (both in-person and virtual), and we also train others to provide good debriefs. (We have trained hundreds of people in how to conduct quality debriefs, including staff at various mission organisations.) To make quality debriefing even more accessible, we now offer a resource to help parents lead their own family debrief at home. We also have a FREE processing worksheet with great questions to ask yourself or someone else to help work through emotions. This free resource is a great place to start if you want to learn more about what a quality debrief can look like.

Photo by Mike Scheid on Unsplash

Home Invasion: Giving Missionary Kids Their Safe Place Back

When I was two years old, after my parents and I returned to Australia from our first time living abroad, our house was burgled while we slept. The thieves took our TV and probably a few other things I don’t remember.

I don’t remember the theft itself, but I clearly remember a nightmare I had a few years later. In my nightmare, men I didn’t know who were silent and invisible came into the house while I was in bed. They picked up my bed with me in it, turning me invisible and silent as well. They carried the bed (and me) out toward the front door, through the living room where my parents were watching TV. I jumped off the bed, at which point they could see and hear me. 

When I told my parents about the nightmare, something clicked for them. The living room I described was the old set up from before the robbery, with the old couch and the old TV. Though I didn’t consciously remember the event, something about it had rooted in my subconscious – and with it, a fear of unseen and unheard men entering my house, making me less safe.

According to Statista, New Zealand had the highest burglary rate per capita in 2018, with 1.3% of homes burgled. Australia’s rate was 0.7%, and the U.S. was 0.4%. If we make the bold assumption that different homes were targeted every year, over the 18 years of childhood that makes 23%, 13%, and 7% of families overall (respectively) that would experience burglary. Yet when TCK Training asked missionary kids if they had experienced a break-in, 38% said yes – compared to only 15% of non-missionary TCKs.

A significant part of that 38% were present during a home invasion: 15% of missionary kids were present in their home when a break-in occurred. These MKs were 35% more likely to have a high-risk ACE score than missionary kids overall (23% vs 17%). With more than one third of missionary kids experiencing a break-in during their childhood, this makes it a fairly common experience among their MK peers. Stories of break-ins are common among MKs. If it didn’t happen to you, it happened to your friend(s). 

One MK I interviewed talked about a home invasion his family experienced on the field while he was in elementary school. The thieves cut power to their home before entering, and in their rural area there were no streetlights or other external light sources, so the entire experience took place in the dark. He remembered huddling in his parents’ bedroom, with them and his younger brother, in the pitch black. They heard the noises downstairs, the hushed voices and the things being broken. For years afterward, he carried a matchbox in his pocket; he needed to know he could create light if he ever found himself in darkness again.

A teenage MK I interviewed spoke of living in a home with a grill of thick bars across each window and still feeling unsafe inside their home. A thief used a long pole to reach through the bar grill when a window was open, using it to steal small items. This made the MK feel imprisoned at home, with windows shut and thick grills over the closed windows — even during hot and humid days. They would close the curtains to block out the community in which these thefts took place.

Every story of theft, break-in, or home invasion is different. The emotional consequences are similar. Our home becomes less of a haven, less of a safe place, when we learn that ‘bad’ people can enter at any time without warning. They could take our precious possessions, entering our home while we sleep (or hide).

This affront to our sense of safety, security, and comfort in our own home is true for both adults and children. Children have less control over their living situations, however, and sometimes are not given much information about what has happened and what the future may hold. This lack of information (and control) can lead to additional anxiety. When home doesn’t feel like a safe place, children/young people stay ‘on alert’ without feeling safe to fully relax anywhere in their world. This leads to a state called ‘toxic stress’ which has negative impacts on the brain and body.

 

What Do We Do?
Feeling safe and protected at home, and especially feeling that there is an adult in the home providing this protection, is one of the Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) that provide a buffer for children who experience difficult things. PCEs enable children to thrive as adults even if they meet with adversity in childhood.

It is crucial that we provide missionary kids with a strong sense of safety at home. This will look different in different contexts, but there are a few principles that apply anywhere.

Explain the safety measures you have in place – no matter what they are or how obvious they look. Talk your kids through what you are doing to create a safe environment for them. Whenever you stay the night in a different place (including hotels, friends’ homes, and visits to your passport country), have this talk again, and go through the safety measures in place there.

Ask your children what makes them feel safe. Help them identify the feeling of safety and security. Have conversations about what that feels like and looks like, and discuss ways to create it in our homes, families, and even our schools and friendships. (This is a important tool for children to learn at any age, for many reasons.) These conversations will give you insights into how to make your child FEEL safe with you and in your home. Remember to model this for them – explain what makes you feel safe and what safety feels like to you.

Encourage your children to tell you if they feel unsafe – and listen to them! Something that seems obviously safe to you may feel uncomfortable, unusual, or even unsafe to your child. You won’t know how they are feeling unless they tell you, and they won’t tell you unless they know you take their concerns seriously. Taking their concerns seriously might look like validating their emotions (“I see this is troubling you; how can I help you feel more safe?”) before talking about the ‘reality’ of a situation (“I understand that it seems this way, and I’m glad you let me know. Can I show you what I see going on here?”).

Initiate regular conversations around safety. This idea is not about teaching lessons on how to be safe, but rather checking in with how everyone is feeling. Has anything happened in your community that impacts how safe you feel? Has their friend’s home been burgled? Has something been in the news? Keep creating opportunities to talk about what it is like to live where you live, as well as how each family member feels about it – it’s quite likely you’ll all feel differently at different times.

As a small child having a nightmare, I woke upset and went to my parents for comfort. They listened to me, made the connection with the robbery in the past, and were open with me about it. My parents talked to me about the robbery, validating my fears, thus assuring me I wasn’t afraid for no reason.

They also explained the likely motivation behind the theft (they were probably people without much money looking for something they could take away and sell but weren’t wanting to hurt me) and ways they keep me safe (explaining about locks on doors, etc.). I don’t recall having another dream like that or significant fears related to home invasion again.

Even when we do our best to provide a safe home for our children, we live in a broken world where bad things sometimes happen. Providing safety for children is therefore both about objective safety (what we do to create physical safety) and also about our perceptions of safety – what makes us feel safe. Parents, the ways you act to make your children feel safe are vitally important. Engaging with their emotions, validating their fears, and talking to them about the situations you face as a family will make a big difference for them long term. 

 

Photo by Nicola Nuttall on Unsplash

What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 2: Support that Lessens the Impact of Witnessed Trauma

In my previous post (What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 1: The Impact of Witnessed Trauma), I shared data from TCK Training’s latest white paper (Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods) along with wisdom from many A Life Overseas authors. As we sifted through information on what can be a difficult topic, we kept in mind these two key points:

  1. We are not comparing the experiences of missionary kids to a theoretical ‘perfect’ childhood they could have had elsewhere.
  1. Not every potentially traumatic event is experienced as trauma by each individual.

This means that often there is no clear ‘right’ answer; different people (different families, different children) will need different things. Setting blanket rules is unlikely to address every situation. Instead, we are going to talk about principles.

My last post included four suggestions for ways we can support families, and in this post I will expand these ideas with practical tips and more wisdom from the ALO team. 

  1. Protect children where possible.
  2. Fight the normalisation of trauma.
  3. Provide support to both parents and children.
  4. Continue support after they leave the field.

Protect children where possible

Knowing that witnessing potentially traumatic events is linked to increased risk should cause us to think carefully about taking our children to places where this can occur.

Part of determining field suitability should include a careful assessment of the level of trauma, including witnessed trauma, likely to occur in the location. If the risk is high, additional supports should be in place. If traumatic events end up happening frequently, a change of location may be warranted. 

How do we make these momentous decisions? Anna Hampton’s thoughts on Risk and the Cross Cultural Worker are so helpful here: “A theology of suffering asks a different question than a theology of risk asks. When I was a young mom facing daily threats of all kinds but especially kidnapping and murder, I needed to be able to evaluate what God was calling me and my children to that day. We hadn’t suffered the reality of kidnapping, but we were facing the risk of it. So how was I to think, to process my emotions, hear God’s voice, and then make a decision on what I was to do?” 

A lot in life cannot be predicted, including how individuals will react to and cope with potentially traumatic events. Flexibility and a willingness to change plans is important – in life generally, but especially in high risk areas. Sometimes a location changes from low risk to high risk very suddenly. Sometimes a single event changes how individuals within a family feel about their emotional and/or physical safety. 

Being willing to sacrifice our plans in order to protect children is crucial. If we sacrifice children in order to continue the plans we had made, there is something wrong with our priorities.

I love how Kay Bruner writes about this in Ask A Counselor: No Child Soldiers, No Child Sacrifice: “We are not called to deliberately – or carelessly – traumatize our children for God’s sake. When traumatic events occur, we should be the first ones at our child’s side bringing care, concern, and healing…Please don’t take your children into active danger, thinking that this will somehow make you a better kind of Christian.” 

Fight the normalisation of trauma

Just because something happens regularly does not mean it is normal. When potentially traumatic events happen regularly, we must actively fight against them being seen as ‘normal.’

Whatever happens regularly during your childhood becomes your normal. Children can adapt to anything – including, sadly, horrible abuse and devastating traumas. Believing these events are ‘normal’ does not, however, stop them from affecting a child’s psyche. This means that in order to process the impact of the abuse and/or trauma they have suffered, an individual must first recognise that what they went through was not normal. 

Many missionary kids normalise abusive and/or traumatic events they experience during childhood – to the point of not mentioning them to adults in their lives, including their parents. This is something we see over and over again at TCK Training, when Adult TCKs dismiss dramatic events and inappropriate behaviour from others as potential sources of trauma because “that was normal where I grew up” or “that happened to everyone.”

Adults in their lives unwittingly contribute to this every time we downplay things that make children feel uncomfortable or unsafe. In addition, while phrases like “Don’t worry, this is normal here” or “You’ll get used to it after a while” may be intended to comfort, they instead teach children to ignore their feelings because what is common is normal. We think that by putting on a happy face, we can make a scary situation okay, but we’re wrong. 

Anna Glenn writes about the problem of pasting a smile over pain in Toxic Positivity in Missions: “Toxic positivity is a reaction that stems from fear and shame rather than faith. It focuses on self-reliance to ‘power through’ and create or shine our own light rather than calling us to step into the light through surrender to the one true God. Toxic positivity is a shallow substitute for the hope of the gospel and a genuine relationship with Christ.” 

Instead, we all need to be brave enough to sit with difficult emotions and to sit with children and young people experiencing difficult emotions. We need to call out the wrongness in our world, even when it happens frequently around us. We need to acknowledge that witnessing potentially traumatic events is evidence of the brokenness of this world – not something to dismiss, but something to mourn. It is something that impacts us, and even the smallest child, on a soul level – because the world should not be this way. 

“We need to recognize these stressful events as threats to the mental health and stability of international families. When we recognize them as such, we can mobilize to acknowledge and debrief these events.” – Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods

Provide support to both parents and children

We need to think about the entire family unit. Children do not live in isolation, but with parents and caregivers who live in the same environments and therefore are likely witnessing the same or similar potentially traumatic events. They may even have witnessed more events from which they have sheltered their children.

Just because parents are adults does not make them immune to the impact of witnessing traumatic events. On the contrary – the impact of traumatic events flows through them to their children. The whole family needs support when living in environments where traffic accidents and violence are occuring. 

“The stress of bearing witness to trauma is easily brought into the home, impacting family dynamics and parent-child connectedness.”  – Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods

Parents need support to process what they have witnessed so that they can be emotionally available to support their children. Unfortunately, in many cases these occurrences are normalised, and families do not feel they are ‘allowed’ to need or want help to work through witnessing events that happen regularly. Yet regular debriefing (and crisis debriefing when a significant event takes place) should be a key part of how families are cared for to ensure long-term health and thriving for each person. 

When these potentially traumatic events are ignored and families do not receive adequate support, the impacts do not go away over time – they fester. As Abigail Follows writes in The Myth of the Ideal Childhood, “We can think of a trauma as a ‘heart wound’ – a wound that needs tending, otherwise it will get infected – a wound that can heal with the right treatment.”

In addition to targeted support, supportive communities that surround families in these situations are incredibly powerful. As I wrote recently in It takes a village – including for missionary families, “The communities supporting families living abroad are essential to these families’ long-term thriving. If we want to see missionary kids thrive long term, we need more than good parenting advice; we need to be the community these families need.” 

When potentially traumatic events occur regularly, when missionaries and their children see these soul-injuring sights in the course of their daily lives, it takes a toll. Anna Glenn writes poignantly on this in The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries:

“For many missionaries who are serving in underdeveloped nations where hunger, disease, and violence run rampant, the horrors that they have witnessed day in and day out may have grown to be too much. We all know that death and pain are a part of life, but when you see people, people you know and love, dying from easily preventable causes nearly every single week and you see bodies on the side of the road mangled to the point of being unrecognizable, your psyche is forever impacted and sometimes there are just no words.”

Given that these words were written in the content of missionaries who have returned to their passport countries from the field, this leads us to our final point:

Continue support after they leave the field

The impact of witnessed trauma doesn’t end when we leave the environment in which it occurred. Unfortunately, upon leaving the field many missionary families lose the supportive community who understood those experiences. Taking care to support missionary families through the lens of accumulated trauma can make a big difference.

This means acknowledging that what feels safe/unsafe may be different for them – especially for children who grew up in a different environment – and that what triggers unsafe feelings may be different. 

Often this includes exposure to media coverage of other countries, including but not limited to countries where the family lived previously. Lilly Rivera brings up an important point in Reading the News When Crisis Hits: “Reading the news can be a triggering experience if you have gone through traumatic experiences yourself. The injustice, violence, and pain can make you feel paralyzed, angry or really upset.” 

I also appreciate this perspective from adult MK Aneurin Howorth in Devastating Secrets of Living Abroad: “The trauma we carry around as TCKs usually manifests itself through mental illnesses once we are adults. The counselor Lois Bushong says that most TCKs tend to only start going to counseling once they are in their 30’s. I am not yet in my thirties, but already, increasing numbers of my classmates report having mental health issues, almost exclusively struggling from unresolved trauma or grief on the mission field. Being a TCK does not stop when we become adults; both the blessings and the curses will follow us forever.” 

The impact of witnessed trauma does not always manifest immediately; sometimes it is a slow burn, which is why long-term care and support is important. It is also why TCK Training is running research on both the good and hard experiences TCKs had during childhood, as well as their strengths and struggles as adults – we want to know more about the links between these so that we can better support TCKs as they grow. (Learn more about the survey here).

 

Resources referenced:

Risk and the Cross Cultural Worker

Ask A Counselor: No Child Soldiers, No Child Sacrifice

Toxic Positivity in Missions

Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods (TCK Training)

Debriefing Resources (TCK Training)

The Myth of the Ideal Childhood

It takes a village – including for missionary families

The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries

Reading the News When Crisis Hits

Devastating Secrets of Living Abroad

Impact of Childhood Global Mobility on Adult Wellness (TCK Training Survey)

Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash

What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 1: The Impact of Witnessed Trauma

Trauma. What does this word make you think of? Does it worry you, even scare you? Does it bring to mind certain events from your own life? Have you seen it used so often that it’s beginning to lose meaning for you? 

I found the definition of trauma Shonna Ingram shared in her post The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field: What Trauma Is and What It Does very helpful:

“Trauma results from any event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life-threatening and that has lasting negative effects on a person’s mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”

Over the years, A Life Overseas has not shied away from difficult topics – including trauma on the mission field and how it impacts missionaries and their children. Together we have written about how to understand trauma and heal from it; specific experiences of trauma and how to process them; the long-term impact of trauma on the field, including on mental health; theology of risk; toxic positivity; moral injury; and more. I have also shared research insights from my work with TCK Training, looking at the experiences of missionary kids and their families over time.

Today I come with new data from TCK Training’s latest white paper (Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods) together with the collected wisdom of A Life Overseas’ authors. I’ll discuss data on potentially traumatic events witnessed by TCKs and reference excellent articles from the A Life Overseas (ALO) library. I’ll list these resources at the end.

Why do we need to talk about trauma?

In TCK Training’s research, which involved over 1,000 missionary kids (MKs), exposure to potentially traumatic events was one of two key risk factors linked to high ACE scores. High ACE scores in turn are linked with increased risk of a range of negative outcomes in adulthood. (The other key risk factor was high mobility, which I wrote about in Mobility is tough on kids: here’s how you can help.)

It’s important to start by recognizing that trauma can, and does, happen everywhere all over the world. Staying in your passport country does not make you immune to trauma, and leaving for the mission field does not guarantee a traumatic outcome. Abigail Follows explained this nicely in The Myth of the Ideal Childhood, where she wrote that “disasters, traumas, and crises happen. They happen everywhere.”

In addition, there is a difference between potential trauma and actual trauma. Witnessing a potentially traumatic event does not mean an individual will necessarily experience it as traumatic.

As Kay Bruner wrote in Ask A Counselor: How Do We Recognize and Cope with Trauma, “The perception that we are helpless in the face of frightening events is one of the foundational pieces of psychological trauma. This helps us understand why some members of a family may be minimally impacted by an event, while others are deeply traumatized.” 

In fact, lack of control means that sometimes children feel a deeper sense of trauma from an event than an adult might in that situation. In other cases, not understanding the full impact of what is happening might mean a child is less impacted. The important point is that we cannot know how each individual will respond, so assumptions are unhelpful.

As we start to look at some difficult numbers together, let’s keep in mind these two pieces of wisdom:

  1. We are not comparing the experiences of missionary kids to a theoretical ‘perfect’ childhood they could have had elsewhere.
  1. Not every potentially traumatic event is experienced as trauma by each individual.

Witnessing Potentially Traumatic Events

The 1,904 ATCKs who took our survey were asked both if they had witnessed a certain type of event at all, and if they had witnessed this ‘regularly.’ The events we asked about included:

  • Extreme poverty
  • Serious traffic accident
  • Armed conflict
  • Traumatic death (human)
  • Traumatic death (animal)
  • Physical violence

86% of missionary kids witnessed at least one of these potentially traumatic events; more than half of missionary kids witnessed potentially traumatic events regularly (53%).

Extreme Poverty

77% of missionary kids reported they had witnessed extreme poverty at least once, and 61% said they witnessed this regularly. Living among those experiencing extreme poverty and knowing you cannot fix it can lead to what Rachel Pieh Jones labelled ‘moral injury.’

In her article on the topic, she writes: “All my high ideals and righteous ambitions lie in tatters at my feet while people around me go hungry and I can never feed them all. When injustice reigns and I don’t protest. When racism rules and I benefit. And that’s just what I’m willing to publicly confess.”

Witnessing extreme poverty was the only item on the above list not linked to higher-than-average risk. That is, MKs who only witnessed extreme poverty (18% of the group) had an ACE risk similar to that seen in the general TCK population.

Serious Traffic Accident

In some countries traffic accidents are more common, and where cars regularly share badly maintained roads with motorcycles (and helmets are not worn), accidents can be particularly traumatic to witness. As Anna Glenn writes in The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries, “[When] you see bodies on the side of the road mangled to the point of being unrecognizable, your psyche is forever impacted and sometimes there are just no words.” 

Three out of every five missionary kids (40%) had witnessed a serious traffic accident by age 18. Nearly a quarter of those (9% of all missionary kids) witnessed serious accidents regularly. 

When originally crafting this survey, we made sure to ask about serious traffic accidents because we’ve seen the impact of ongoing struggles related to witnessed accidents, even when TCKs were not directly involved in the accident themselves. A variety of reactions, including fear, anxiety, nightmares, reluctance to drive/learn to drive, and PTSD, can be involved. 

Witnessing Violence

More than half of missionary kids (59%) witnessed one of the final four types of potentially traumatic events we listed: 

  1. armed conflict
  2. human death
  3. traumatic animal death
  4. physical violence

For the purpose of our survey, we defined armed conflict as “two groups fighting with weapons.” We found that 20% of missionary kids had witnessed armed conflict.

One quarter of missionary kids had witnessed the traumatic death of a person (24%), including 4% who witnessed a murder. They had the same increased ACE risk as those who witnessed armed conflict (28% of the group had high-risk ACE scores). The risk was higher again for MKs who regularly witnessed any kind of human death, with one third of this group having a high ACE score (33%), nearly double the rate for MKs overall. 

In our work with adult TCKs, we have often found that animal death comes up as an event requiring debriefing as it had not been processed effectively at the time it occurred. More than one third of missionary kids (35%) reported witnessing the traumatic death of an animal. Witnessing animal death came with an increased ACE risk, especially when it happened regularly. The risk associated with regularly witnessing traumatic animal death was the same as the risk associated with regularly witnessing human death.

What do we do about this?

Based on the research around trauma, including the data we have on what MKs are experiencing, I have four suggestions about what we should do next. In my next article, I expand on these four ideas with practical suggestions and more quotes from the ALO library: 

  1. Protect children where possible.
  2. Fight the normalisation of trauma.
  3. Provide support to both parents and children.
  4. Continue support after they leave the field.

The Good News

Not all TCKs, and not all missionary kids, witnessed these types of potentially traumatic events. When we review the data on those who were not exposed, we find some wonderful news!

Looking at the missionary kids who did not regularly witness traumatic events, only 9% had a high Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) score (4 or more out of 10), compared to 12.5% of Americans and 17% of MKs overall.

Looking then at missionary kids who did not witness ANY potentially traumatic events, only 6% of recorded 4 or more ACEs – lower than seen in any study we could find in any country using the same question framing.

This is really good news. It suggests that when MKs grow up in environments where they are not witnessing these types of potentially traumatic events, their families are healthier overall. 

Read part two: What Missionary Kids See on the Field Part 2: Support that Lessens the Impact of Witnessed Trauma

Resources referenced:

The Unseen Trauma of the Mission Field: What Trauma Is and What It Does

Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods (TCK Training)

Mobility is tough on kids: here’s how you can help

The Myth of the Ideal Childhood

Ask A Counselor: How Do We Recognize and Cope with Trauma

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) (TCK Training)

Moral Injury

The Untold Stories of Returned Missionaries

Photo by Nimrod Persson on Unsplash

 

It takes a village – including for missionary families

There’s an old adage that ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ While it’s often called an African proverb – and there are several that come close, like the Kijita/Wajita proverb from Tanzania, “Omwana ni wa bhone” – the specific origin isn’t important for today’s discussion.

When I say ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ what I mean is that parents can’t do everything needed for a child’s raising on their own. We are, each of us, designed for community. We need each other – and no less so than when faced with the blessing and burden of child-rearing.

Research into what helps individuals thrive, even when their upbringing is difficult, identified eight Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) which act as a protective buffer. Five of the eight PCEs take place outside the home. To raise healthy children who thrive long-term, we really do need to be in community and to rely on each other. 

Sometimes that can be a scary prospect. It’s scary to think we can’t do it all ourselves. It takes some of the control out of parents’ hands. On the other hand, it also acknowledges that parents are not supposed to carry the entire weight of ensuring their children’s future all on their own. We are, all of us, created for community.

But what happens when you live internationally? Community may feel hard to find, hard to break into, or hard to hold onto. There are language barriers, cultural differences, and time zones separating you from people you care about. People move away. You move away. Sometimes it really seems like the best option to turn inward and focus your energy on your immediate family, on being your own community as a family. 

In this article we’ll look at the five PCEs that take place in community and what these can look like for missionaries. My goal is to encourage you to see value in continuing to invest in community that meets your children’s needs throughout their lives.

Belonging in Community

The first two community PCEs are about being part of a community: feeling a sense of belonging in a wider community and taking part in community traditions. Churches, mission organisations, and school communities can all be wonderful sources of these community PCEs. These communities are not just for us – they are for our children. Ensuring that our children feel at ease and feel a sense of belonging in the groups where we spend our leisure time is essential to their long-term thriving. 

The traditions we participate in also connect us to our communities – both the specific groups of people we celebrate with and the local community we observe traditions with. When your family moves locations, look for ways to bring traditions with you. Examples might be celebrating Chinese New Year with your new friends in France, introducing your Australian friends to Songkran, or observing three different national days for three different countries your heart is connected to.

Most often, our biggest hurdle here is finding the emotional energy to continue to invest in community when our lives are busy and it gets hard to make time for all the things we could possibly be doing. Knowing that community is important for our kids’ wellbeing helps provide us with motivation to keep investing in community. This also means that community life needs to be a priority — even if it means we need to cut back on other tasks, such as ministry commitments, in order to have the time and energy to commit to community engagement.

Peer Relationships

The next two community PCEs are having supportive friends throughout childhood and having a sense of belonging in high school. Do your children have supportive friends? For some parents, this is a stressful thought. Perhaps one child does, and one does not. Perhaps you have watched your child lose a best friend every year as families move away from your location. Perhaps they sometimes play with local children, but the only friends who speak their heart language live hundreds of miles away. 

TCK Training’s white paper “Sources of Trauma in International Families” has a section on Peer Relationships. In this section we share research explaining why “Peer relationships in childhood are an important part of social development that is necessary for childhood wellbeing and also for gaining important social skills needed in adulthood,” and cite a study which demonstrated that “93% of children surveyed could understand and can articulate the feeling of loneliness and lack of peers by age eight.”

The good news from our research was that more than half of TCKs (and 46% of Missionary Kids, or MKs) had a peer group their own age. 15% of MKs had only their siblings for company. 10% of each group had no appropriate peers, including 2% who had no peers. Homeschooled MKs were less likely to have peers: only 17% had peers their own age, 38% had only their siblings, and 6% had no peers at all.

TCKs with peers their own age reported fewer Adverse Childhood Experiences, and this was true across all sectors, ages, and education types. 13% of MKs with peers their own age had a high ACE score – compared to 12.5% of Americans in the baseline Kaiser study. By contrast, 21% of MKs with no peers or only siblings for peers had a high ACE score.

But language comfort also mattered. When the peers an MK spent time with spoke a language they were not comfortable speaking, 29% had a high ACE score, almost double the rate seen in those who shared a fluent language with their peers (15%). While 24% of MKs spoke with their peers in a language they weren’t fluent with, only 8% said they spoke a language they weren’t fluent in with their closest friends.

Held together, these different types of research are all telling us something similar: our kids need friends they can share their lives with. Friends they can speak to easily. Part of meeting children’s needs means providing opportunities for them to make connections with peers around the same age who could possibly become this type of friend — and supporting the continuation of those connections wherever we are in the world. 

Mentor Figures

The final community PCE is having two non-parent adults who take a genuine interest in you during childhood. There are lots of ways this PCE can be met! Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends can fill this role. Teachers, coaches, tutors, and pastors can fill this role. Nannies, babysitters, and other community members can fill this role. It is not about the quantity of time an adult spends with a child but about whether the adult really makes the child feel seen and valued whenever they are around each other. 

I’ve heard stories from MKs about very significant adults in their lives whom they saw once a month or even less often. I will never forget overhearing a teenage girl who lived in far north China and came to Beijing twice a year to attend youth camps I ran explaining to her friend who I was: “This is my youth pastor from my youth group in Beijing.”

These adult connections are extremely important to children and teens. Here are four simple things that can make a significant connection with an MK, even if you do not see them regularly:

  1. Know their preferred name and use it.
  2. See them as their own person, separate from their family and their parents’ ministry.
  3. Learn and remember their individual interests.
  4. Follow up on previous conversations.

The ease with which a connection with a caring adult can become significant to a TCK could explain one of the findings in our research. We asked the 1,904 Adult TCKs in our survey if anyone in their household (adult or child) or any caregiving adult (who did not live in their home) passed away during their childhood. The type of death associated with the most significant rise in ACE scores was that of non-residential, non-family caregivers — which points to their importance. 

36% of TCKs who reported the death of a non-residential caregiver during childhood had a high risk ACE score; when the caregiver who died was not a family friend or family member, 43% had a high risk ACE score. In contrast, only 24% of TCKs who reported the death of a household member (adult or child) had a high risk ACE score.

We don’t believe this means that a death in the family does not greatly impact children. So what does it mean? There are few things that might explain this correlation. First, it may reflect the importance these adults have to the family as a whole: their passing impacts not only the child, but their parents as well (which then impacts what happens in the household, along with their ACE score).

Second, it may reflect that household deaths are seen as a significant event, so families receive support and space to grieve. On the other hand, the death of a non-residential caregiver, while sad, may not result in the same recognition or support. Whatever the reason behind it, these numbers demonstrate that adults who provide care to missionary kids and other TCKs can have a significant impact.

What can we do about this?

The communities supporting families living abroad are essential to these families’ long-term thriving. If we want to see missionary kids thrive long term, we need more than good parenting advice; we need to be the community these families need. 

If you are parenting abroad, take some time to acknowledge the village that is helping you raise your child/ren. Show your appreciation to those who are there, supporting you and supporting your kids.

Next, look for the gaps in your village. Are you missing group community, people to celebrate traditions with? Are your kids lacking for peers, especially those they share a language with? Are you in need of more adults to engage meaningfully with your kids? Identify the particular gaps, and target those areas for more community engagement. Don’t be afraid to ask people for help; child-rearing was never meant to be a burden that you shouldered alone.

If you are living abroad, look around to notice any missionary kids and families you are in community with – or whose village you might be able to join. Could you be part of their regular community life? Could you take the time to know their kids by name and engage with them when you routinely see them? Are there other ways you would like to offer community?

If you are supporting a family abroad, whether you are a sending church or family/friends ‘left behind,’ look for creative ways you can stand in the gap for the missionary families you know. How can you be part of their village? What can you do that acknowledges their children as individuals and not just the missionary’s kids? What traditions can you make part of your interaction with their family? How can you help them feel connected to what you’re doing in your community in another land?

No matter where you are, there is something you can do to support the missionary families you know. You are part of the village, and you are needed.

 

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

How many years abroad is safe for kids?

“How many years abroad is safe for kids?”

This is a question we have been asked many times at TCK Training. I have also heard similar questions from missionary organizations – at what point do families need transition prep and repatriation support? How many years overseas is safe? At what point does it become dangerous?

I only lived outside my passport country for two years as a teenager. Speaking from personal experience, I had a rocky entry to life there and a rocky re-entry to my passport country. But I can’t speak for everyone. So when TCK Training did our survey of Adverse Childhood Experiences among globally mobile TCKs, one of the questions we asked was “How many years did you live outside your passport country?” And now we have some answers.

Our latest white paper was just published: Sources of Trauma in International Childhoods: Providing Individualized Support to Increase Positive Outcomes for Higher Risk Families (released October 26). It contains ten ‘mini-papers’ looking at different factors in the lives of TCKs and how they impacted Adverse Childhood Experiences. The first factor we looked at was length of time lived abroad. 

As we analyzed the data, something quickly became clear. Those who spent the least time outside their passport countries had the highest ACE scores. That is to say, living a shorter period of time abroad was associated with higher levels of abuse and neglect.

  • 19% of missionary kids who lived abroad 0-3 years were physically abused at home, compared to 12% of those who lived abroad 16-18 years. 
  • 13% of missionary kids who lived abroad 0-3 years reported physical neglect, compared to only 6% of those who lived abroad 16-18 years. 
  • 45% of missionary kids who lived abroad 0-3 years reported emotional neglect, compared to 30% of those who lived abroad 16-18 years. 
  • 44% of missionary kids who lived abroad 0-3 years reported that an adult in their childhood home experienced mental illness, compared to 28% of those who lived abroad 16-18 years.
  • 21% of missionary kids who lived abroad 0-3 years had a high-risk ACE score, compared to only 7.5% of missionary kids who lived abroad 16-18 years. 

What does this mean?

These numbers demonstrate correlation, not causation. We cannot look at this and say that staying overseas a long time causes healthy families. But we can say that a higher percentage of families who lived overseas a long time were healthier. In the rest of this post we will look at three potential factors related to this, as well as what we can do about it.

Transition is hard

Every location move is a big transition and a disruption to both family life and peer relationships. We previously noted a correlation between high mobility and high-risk ACE scores (see our paper Caution and Hope for more on this). Those who spend a short time overseas are likely to have made two international moves in a short period of time – a high level of transition and disruption. These ‘short term’ families are therefore in more need of transition and repatriation support, not less!

Expat life brings out the hard stuff

Good expat preparation tells individuals and couples to prepare for the hardest parts of their personal lives to go into overdrive due to the stress of transition and intercultural living. Some families discover that the stress of this life is not good for them and choose to return to their passport countries. TCKs who lived their entire lives outside their passport countries are more likely to belong to healthy families, as these families are more likely to choose to stay abroad. 

In order to stay healthy, parents need mental health support. The level of mental illness seen in families who spend shorter times abroad show that this is a big problem in need of addressing.

We can’t blame it on external trauma

Another reason that families may not spend their children’s whole childhood abroad is if a traumatic event takes place. Yet TCKs who lived abroad 13-18 years were more likely to report experiencing or being impacted by a violent event than those who spent 0-6 years abroad. 

Our hypothesis here is that when families have strong communities in which they are supported, giving them personal support to parent well and family support through difficult situations, they are healthier overall. This is better for the family long term than going through an additional transition (with accompanying dislocation and disruption) to receive care elsewhere.

What does ‘safe’ look like? 

This data shatters the myth that there is a ‘safe’ number of years for a family to live abroad. A shorter time abroad may mean a child is less likely to have deep identity and belonging struggles, but that is not true for all TCKs. A shorter time abroad definitely does not mean a family will not struggle with culture shock and reverse culture shock. All families making an international move should receive transition training and repatriation support, no matter how long or short their time abroad. 

If ‘safe’ is not about time, what is it about? I contend that ‘safe’ is all about family health. If parents are emotionally healthy, including mental health supports that enable them to keep their stress levels manageable, they can parent well and be emotionally available to their children. Healthy families have strong parent-child connectedness, so that children feel their parents’ love. This is a key factor in providing safety to children as they transition and grow.

Instead of asking “How many years abroad is safe for kids?” let us start asking “How do we make our homes, families, and communities safe for kids?” We can protect missionary kids by providing emotional safety for them. We can protect missionary kids by caring well for their parents, including mental health support and parenting education. We can protect missionary kids by creating supportive communities that include them and their families. There’s no ‘safe’ number of years abroad for every family, but together we can work to provide every family with the level of care they need to thrive on the field.

 

For more information:

TCK Training’s research. This includes free access to all three white papers, along with blog posts about specific groups, such as missionary kids. 

Free PCEs miniseries. PCEs are Positive Childhood Experiences. This miniseries offers information on providing emotional safety and protection to children as they grow up abroad.

Self-Guided Transitions Course, with videos, exercises, and more. This course is designed to support families (and inform caregivers) through all stages and types of transitions.

Photo by Steven Coffey on Unsplash