Tag: parenting MKs

Neurodiversity in the World of TCKs

You might be wondering why addressing neurodivergence in the context of ministry is an important endeavor. I get it — I’ve wondered too! The best answer I can offer is this: because neurodivergent children and adults live among us. Because they are cherished by God and worthy of our investment of time and effort. And because ignorance is not bliss — it can fracture God’s Kingdom with misunderstandings, conflict, and the withholding of empathy.

If only because it grows us into loving better and more thoughtfully, I believe that learning more about the humans around us is a spiritual practice and God-given privilege. 

NEURODIVERSITY IN THE WORLD OF TCKs

There is a particular kind of exhaustion many globally mobile families experience. The kind that feels linked—sometimes in obscure ways—to that third airport security line, that calendar-busting conference, that language-learning plateau, that brutal goodbye to friends we may not see again, that moment your child dissolves into tears because the cereal tastes different in this country, or that weather pattern that sucks the life out of everyday activities.

In the cross-cultural community, we tend to tell ourselves that it’s transition stress. Culture shock. Jet lag. Grief. And often, it is—or a combination of them all.

But there can also be something more complex happening beneath the surface. Something quieter, more deeply wired into the way a child experiences the world—or, in the case of MKs, multiple worlds.

What is neurodivergence?

In recent years, conversations around neurodiversity have become far more common. Current estimates suggest that between 15% and 20% of the population may be neurodivergent, so it’s no wonder that efforts to deepen our understanding are expanding.

At its simplest, neurodivergence means that a brain functions differently from what is considered usual or “typical.” Neurodiversity embraces the idea that everybody’s brain works uniquely and that neurodivergence is a normal variation.

ADHD, autism, OCD, dyslexia, sensory processing differences, dyscalculia, traumatic brain injury, and other neurological differences can all fall under this broad umbrella. Neurodivergence can show up in countless ways—from sensory overwhelm and learning differences to intense creativity, diminished executive function, or information processing that differs from that of brains considered more “typical.”

The Strengths of Neurodivergence

Though neurological differences were formerly viewed simply as deficits, researchers and clinicians now understand neurodivergence as part of the natural variation of human brains—producing unique strengths as well as unique challenges.

It’s important to remember that these same TCKs wrestling with layers of difference often possess extraordinary gifts.

In her article At the Intersection: Navigating Neurodivergence and Third Culture Kids, Dr. Kristen Williamson highlights the creativity, innovation, empathy, deep focus, and problem-solving abilities that frequently accompany neurodivergence. The child who notices details everyone else misses. The teenager who learns languages through patterns and rhythms. The young adult whose emotional sensitivity allows them to connect deeply across cultures.

Sometimes the very wiring that makes life more complicated also allows a child to experience beauty, excel academically, analyze complex data, and respond with empathy more naturally than the rest of us do.

The Relief of Diagnosis

Of the adult TCKs interviewed for this article and its accompanying video, most weren’t diagnosed until adulthood. Sometimes diagnosis came after burnout. After reentry. After struggles in higher education. Or after years of wondering why ordinary life seemed to require extraordinary effort.

For many neurodivergent people and their families, diagnosis itself is not the devastating moment they feared. Often, it brings relief—because there is finally language for their strengths and challenges. There is an explanation for why transitions feel catastrophic rather than merely difficult. Why noise feels physically painful. Why social interaction requires marathon-level energy. Why someone can appear perfectly composed in public and completely unravel at home.

Neurodivergence in Cross-Cultural Spaces

For Third Culture Kids, neurodivergence can create a particularly layered experience because so much of TCK life already requires constant adaptation. New schools. New languages. New social rules. New expectations. New relationships. New losses.

Indian writer and advocate Nanyadiri, who is autistic and has ADHD (AuDHD), describes the autistic TCK life as “a difference inside a difference.” The phrase captures something globally mobile families recognize in their children with neurodivergence: some are not merely learning to adapt across cultures; they are trying to navigate a world that may already have been unpredictable, confusing, or painfully loud—and now it is exponentially more overwhelming.

Transition is one of the greatest challenges for neurodivergent TCKs. Airports. Temporary housing. Shifting routines. New foods. Unfamiliar smells. Different classroom expectations. New cultural customs. All the unpredictability that globally mobile families eventually normalize can feel deeply dysregulating.

For some children, the adventure of it all feels exhilarating. But for others, it might feel more like being forced to stand in the chaos of Times Square at rush hour—with strangers yelling questions, street vendors selling unfamiliar things, friends pushing new foods at their faces, and a thunderous storm assailing them with rain and wind—all while realizing that everything familiar (people, places, routines, their own bed) is no longer within reach.

Now imagine trying to manage that 24/7—without protective filters, escape routes, or loved ones who understand how exhausting it is.

The Tangled Strands of TCKness and Neurodivergence

The challenges don’t end with transition. For those who love TCKs with autism, OCD, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence, distinguishing brain differences from cross-cultural traits can be difficult.

The impact of neurodivergence, trauma, and chronic stress can sometimes look remarkably similar. Frequent moves, unresolved grief, political instability, educational disruption, repeated upheaval, and abuse can all affect a child’s nervous system. Meanwhile, globally mobile life itself already looks unconventional.

A child who struggles socially may be assumed to be adjusting to a new culture. A child overwhelmed in crowds may be labeled sensitive. Executive-functioning difficulties may be blamed on transition stress rather than recognized as part of ADHD or autism.

Jenilee Goodwin, a fellow A Life Overseas writer, notes in How to Notice Neurodiversity in Third Culture Kids that neurodivergent TCKs often slip under the radar for precisely this reason. Sometimes what we’re seeing really is TCK struggle. Sometimes it is an expression of an underlying brain difference. Quite frequently, it is a combination of both.

This is why untangling the strands of TCKness and neurodivergence is so complicated. It takes time, learning, wisdom, and often an investment of effort and funds in professional evaluation. Understanding the “why” behind a child’s behavior is essential to providing support that addresses their actual needs rather than applying strategies that may exacerbate their struggles.

Knowing more can change the entire conversation from frustration to compassion—and then to appropriate action.

The Realities of Masking

Another reason neurodivergence gets missed in cross-cultural communities is that so many children become exceptionally good at masking. Especially TCKs. Especially bright, capable, adaptable children who are praised for maturity and flexibility.

Girls, in particular, are often missed because their struggles don’t match traditional stereotypes of neurodivergence. Rather than appearing disruptive or hyperactive, many become experts at people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional caretaking, or quiet overachievement. They may look socially successful while privately rehearsing conversations, analyzing interactions, and becoming chronically exhausted from trying to make coping appear effortless.

In missionary and ministry environments, children who mask well may be celebrated as adaptable, mature, helpful, and selfless while carrying extraordinary levels of internal stress.

And boys can mask too—especially thoughtful, sensitive boys who learn early that emotional overwhelm or social confusion feels unsafe to reveal. But because many people still picture neurodivergence primarily as a loud little boy bouncing off classroom walls, quieter presentations are frequently overlooked altogether.  

So many neurodivergent TCKs are working tirelessly behind the scenes to appear “fine.” They study social expectations. They rehearse conversations. They observe peers and imitate what seems socially acceptable. They hold themselves together all day and then collapse emotionally once they reach home.

Psychologist Laura Mannucci captures this beautifully in Belonging in Translation: Autism, ADHD, and the Hidden Labor of Adapting Across Cultures: “When you have learned to mirror others to belong, the authentic self becomes hard to locate.”

The immense mental effort required to constantly decode cultural expectations while also navigating neurodivergence becomes, as Mannucci describes it, “an ongoing negotiation between worlds.” For many TCKs, that hidden hypervigilance becomes a way of life—and an exhausting drain on their energy.

What Neurodivergent TCKs Need from All of Us

According to the TCKs I interviewed, one of the gentlest shifts parents can make is moving from disciplining difference to approaching it with curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why is my child overreacting?” ask, “What might this situation feel like inside my child’s nervous system? What could be the reason for that?” Instead of rewarding the masking that allows children to appear more “typical,” invest time, effort, and funding into the kind of research and testing that might uncover liberating answers.

And then extend love—because there are far too many neurodivergent TCKs who believe their brain difference is failure, weakness, or even sin. We as a community need to speak—and be—the antidote to those destructive lies.

So what can we actually do?

Throughout ministry life, small changes can foster stability and safety: limiting social commitments, building in respite, creating quiet spaces and predictable routines, reducing toxic stress where possible, educating siblings and community members, and supporting activities that allow for regulation and expression—art, movement, writing, creating, organizing, inventing, or analyzing.

Even adjusting family menus to accommodate intolerable textures and tastes can matter. For some autistic children, this isn’t simply a food preference; it is a visceral inability to get past the texture or taste.

Jenilee Goodwin encourages families in transition to build predictability wherever possible: visual schedules, familiar foods, comfort objects, advance warning before changes, recovery time after overstimulation, and small rituals carried from country to country.

These things may sound insignificant to people who function more typically, but to a neurodivergent child, they can feel like safety in the swirling center of threatening chaos.

Parents may also need to reevaluate expectations around pace and productivity. Many neurodivergent TCKs can technically endure crowded schedules, rapid travel, stimulating ministry environments, and constant social interaction—while paying an invisible emotional cost.

A child may be coping remarkably well on the outside while quietly unraveling internally. 

But there’s a huge difference between surviving and flourishing.

The Beauty in the Difference

Goodwin’s articles emphasize the importance of helping children understand their own brains with dignity and compassion. Neurodivergent children need language that frames their differences not as personal failures, but as part of their unique wiring. Dr. Williamson argues that when neurodivergent TCKs receive understanding and support, many develop exceptional resilience, intercultural awareness, empathy, and creativity.

When I speak with adult TCKs who received a diagnosis about what they wish someone had told them sooner, they point to the crucial importance of parents and loved ones affirming who they are—and rejecting the lies the world and their own inner voice might inflict on them.

Perhaps one of the most hopeful truths emerging from these conversations is that many neurodivergent TCK adults—with affirmation, care, support, and therapy—eventually come to see their differences not merely as obstacles, but as part of the very wiring that shaped their strengths. The sensitivity that once led to overwhelm becomes empathy. Hyper-awareness becomes emotional intelligence. The lifelong practice of observing cultures and decoding people becomes insight and wisdom.

The traits that complicated childhood can become part of what allows these adults to move through the world with unusual compassion, creativity, and depth.

Not despite their wiring—because of it.

And perhaps that is the invitation here—not to pathologize difference, nor to romanticize struggle, but to notice children more carefully. To listen more curiously. To create environments where they do not have to spend their lives pretending to be less sensitive, less intense, less observant, or less themselves in order to belong.

Because some of the children who experience the world most deeply may also be the ones most capable of helping the rest of us see it more clearly.

They are not broken.

They are not burdens.

They are unique, precious, created by God, and so very loved by Him.

 

Further learning:

— This version of the article does not include the profound and fascinating quotes collected from eleven neurodivergent adult TCKs. You can find the full article here.

— My entire three-part series on TCKs and Neurodiversity (including an interview with Jenilee Goodwin, an extended version of this article, and a videoed collection of personal stories from adult TCKs) is here.  

— Additional reading:

Belonging in Translation — Laura Mannucci
Different, Not Less — Chloé Hayden
Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for You — Jenara Nerenberg
Driven to Distraction — Hallowell & Ratey
Embracing the Autism Spectrum — Dr. Stephanie Holmes
Lost in Translation: The Social Language Theory of Neurodivergence — Janae Elisabeth
Neurodiversity for Dummies — John Marble, Khushboo Chabria, and Ranga Jayaraman
Uniquely Human — Barry Prizant
Uniquely Us — Dr. Stephanie Holmes
Unmasking Autism — Devon Price

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.

Crossing Cultures for Love

by Ruth Potinu

“Where you go I will go,” our pastor read on our wedding day. “Where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God.”

I hadn’t yet been to my husband’s homeland. We’d met while both doing cross-cultural work outside of our passport countries. I was excited to meet his family and start the work that we felt God calling us to. Once my visa came through, two months after our wedding, we left for a two-year commitment that has since turned into living in my husband’s home country for the last eleven years.

The honeymoon stage got me through language learning, adjusting to cultural differences, and being the only expat living in his village. It can be isolating at times, and yet I am so grateful for my husband’s family who are now my family. The gift of being accepted and protected through marriage is something I don’t take for granted, especially in a country that is not my own. We ended up settling in the capital city, and my husband’s church accepted and welcomed me there as well, becoming family away from family.

As an MK who never knows how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” I love that my kids can say that they are from the country where we serve. They have cousins and a grandmother here. I love that my husband’s village has now become my village, and while that can come with its own pressures and expectations at times, it also comes with so much support and a safety net that allows me to live in this beautiful, but often complicated country.

But while cross-cultural marriage comes with so many blessings, it can also hold heaviness. There was a moment when covid-19 was ravishing the globe that travel restrictions became so intense that I wondered if we would ever be able to travel again, as a family, to my home country.

I watched many cross-cultural workers boarding planes arranged by the US government to get them out of a country known for a having a weak medical infrastructure. For me, getting on one of those planes wasn’t really an option as it would mean leaving my husband behind. In fact, even our scheduled furlough didn’t happen that year when the airline contacted us to say the flight we had already booked would now not be happening.

I cried ugly tears one day as restriction after restriction made it harder and harder for non-citizens to enter the US. Would normal travel ever open up again? Was I really ready to give up the opportunity to see my biological family? That felt like too big of an ask.

I love the work that we are able to be a part of. I love my family in country, but I also love my family who live oceans away. Jesus words in Luke 14:26 suddenly held so much more weight: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot by my disciple.”

It’s easy to say you’re willing to give up your family in theory, but a much different feeling to actually come to a place when you might actually have to live that out. “Help, me. I don’t think I am strong enough” was and often is my silent prayer.

Eventually doors for normal travel did open again. Relief comes, and you savor every minute that you can with those who live far way. There is sacrifice as grandparents on one side of the planet get to spend quality time in person with their grandchildren while those on a different side of the globe do not get that as often. Missed milestones like baptisms, school programs, and birthdays hold such a mix of joy and hard. I’m thankful for technology, but only so much can be experienced through a screen.

Covid is in the rearview mirror now, but just last month our host country was added to a list requiring high bond fees for non-citizens to travel to the US on a visitor visa. I already heard of one friend in a cross-cultural marriage whose visa application was denied after this new requirement, and their planned furlough is now in jeopardy. Constantly changing visa rules and restrictions have a way of adding stress to so many cross-cultural marriages.

And yet, here we are thankful for the love we have that reached across borders. I am thankful for a love that gives our children identity in some areas even though it can give confusion in other areas. We have a love that comes from opposites attracting, and now we must daily figure out how to live a life together. I’m thankful, and it tests me. I’m grateful, and it’s hard. I love getting to live such a culturally rich life, and I pray often for God to give me the strength to live it well in spite of the heaviness that it can hold.

~~~~~~~

Ruth Potinu works alongside her husband in his homeland of Papua New Guinea. There they seek to minister to the vulnerable, especially widows and their children. She is the author of Permission to Mourn: Engaging with Culture, Story and Scripture in a Quest for Healing with Hope. Ruth loves watching her four kids grow up, connecting with friends (preferably over a good cup of chai), and writing whenever she can carve out the time.

 

Sparking an Interest in Missions in MKs

As a global worker and parent, I want my children to love God and to love missions. Although being raised in cross-cultural missions sometimes presents a pandora’s box of hardship and challenges for our children, it is also a precious gift we give our MKs. We have an opportunity to spark their interest in missions by inviting them to hear missionary stories and also to participate in mission alongside us. In this article I offer some ideas on how to thoughtfully do that.

Start with Storytelling

Stories and chats about stories are some of the best ways to learn. Jesus knew this. The Gospels tell us that He barely said anything to the crowds unless it was in the form of a parable (Matthew 13:34). British children’s author and poet, Michael Rosen, put it well when he said, ‘A child, a book, a read, a chat. This is the way the mind grows.’ For Missionary Kids it could be rephrased to ‘An MK, a missions story, a read, a chat. This is the way a child grows to love missions.’ The reflection and chat afterwards are so important to growing and learning.

God calls and uses Missionary Kids, so they need stories to equip and empower them to share the gospel in their schools and homes, in their everyday lives, as well as alongside their parents in cross-cultural missions, when appropriate.

Begin with Scripture: The Story of All Stories

Firstly, let’s point our children to our missionary God in Scripture: the call of Abram in Genesis 12; the books of Jonah, Ruth, and Daniel; Jesus’ mission statement (Luke 4:16-21) and miracles; the lost coin, sheep, and son parables in Luke 15; the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20); the Holy Spirit’s coming and empowering to share the good news (Acts 2); Philip and the Ethiopian (Acts 8:26-40); Paul’s missionary journeys (Acts 13-28); God’s heart for the nations (Revelations 7:9-10). These are just a few of the inspiring Scripture stories to share with MKs about God using ordinary people to reach the lost and broken with the gospel message.

Perhaps for older MKs, or those who have grown up in church, it is not about sparking an interest, but stoking it: adding the wood of a fresh perspective to a well-known story, or directing them to a lesser-known one, to fuel a mission flame and make it burn brighter. Consider Ebed-Melech, the Ethiopian who helped save Jeremiah from the cistern and interceded for the king (Jeremiah 38-39); the women who supported Jesus (Luke 8:1-3); Paul’s colleagues, church hosts/supporters (some of whom are mentioned in Colossians 4:10-15); and the freed Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20) — an unlikely gospel-bearer sent by Jesus to his home and people.

Remember the pattern: a story, a read, a chat.

The Power of Hearing Someone Else’s Story

God put missions to Brazil on my heart when I was sixteen years old; stories of past and present missionaries inspired and set a precedent.

Although they didn’t know it at the time, my parents’ gifting in hospitality played a large part in drawing me to missions. They regularly hosted 20+ church friends for a meal and then huddled around a screen looking at photos from Peru, or Central Asia, or Tanzania, listening to a recently-returned cross-cultural mission worker share about their ministry and how God was at work in a particular place. Throughout my childhood and teenage years, hearing mission partners share their stories and passion for bringing the good news to other people groups happened regularly enough that I considered it normal to serve in missions.

One of the best ways to spark a love of missions in children and teens is for them to hear, in person if possible, mission partners sharing their stories. Churches can inspire their children and young people by making space for mission partners to share. 

Read Mission Stories

Whilst seeing and hearing mission partners in person is impactful, reading mission biographies can be too.

I recently read Steve Richardson’s Perfect Peace Child with my six- and eight-year-old MKs. They were captivated by the colourful and vibrant illustrations of the New Guinean jungle swamps, bugs, and descriptions of the Sawi people’s lives. We had a good conversation about the joys and challenges for a young MK and his family of contextualising and sharing the gospel with the unreached Sawi during times of intertribal conflict. We chatted about how that meant living alongside them and learning from them as ‘experts in jungle living’ and how much we all need a deep-down, forever peace that can only come from having Jesus in our hearts.

For those who are familiar with Don Richardson’s well-known story or film, what struck me about this child-friendly retelling by their MK son was less of the Sawi’s identity as head-hunters and cannibals and more of God’s presence and provision — often unexpectedly using their MK family, despite the challenges of limited language and cultural understanding.

God’s Child: A True Story of Brave Faith in Ethiopia is an engaging story for parents to introduce their middle graders (eight- to twelve-year-olds) to the realities of the persecuted church. There are not enough mission biographies about Black Africans, especially ones so well-researched and written. It tells the true story of Negussie, a boy who grows up near a missions base in rural, communist Ethiopia during the 1970s. He joins an underground church during the Red Terror, is persecuted and jailed for his faith, but finds ways to share the gospel and hold onto hope in dark times.

Some children will be greatly impacted to learn about the persecution and suffering many Christians face in their daily lives. I was glad to have read it cover-to-cover before introducing it to my eight-year-old so that I could be prepared for the questions which came. For us it was a prompt to look again and pray for the persecuted church and to encourage our MK that God is at work even in the darkest times and places.

The stories of God at work through mission workers can be powerful and faith-fueling for little ones. As well as the pioneering missionaries I grew up reading about — Amy Carmichael, William Carey, Jim Elliot, Gladys Aylward, and Hudson Taylor (see the Heroes for Young Readers series or Irene Howat’s Lightkeepers series) — there are now more mission biographies of Black missionaries for younger readers, including the Do Good for God series which includes Maria Fearing and Betsey Stockton. We look to Global South authors to write biographies of your mission workers, of whom far too little is known or written.

Lead Conversations about Missionary Stories

The chat about the book could be as simple as, ‘Are there any ideas that are new to you in what you are reading?’ or ‘How did they handle challenges?’ or ‘Has anything like that ever happened to you?’ Take time to actively listen to understand, rather than just to teach. 

In Third Culture Kids: A Gift to Care For, Ulrika Ernvik suggests offering children ‘bubbles,’ especially for harder conversations: floating a comment, often connected to a deeper feeling, and allowing the child to engage or let it drift by if they do not feel ready to reply. 

For example: ‘Imagine growing up, like Steve Richardson, in a place where none of your friends have heard of Jesus.’ Or, ‘Negussie must have felt a bit lonely when his friend John left Ethiopia. It’s hard to say goodbye to friends.’ In essence, we wonder out loud with our kids present. Sometimes the reply comes days later. Reading, listening, and wondering together are the goals: sparking an interest and curiosity in missions and connecting over it.

Create a Mission-Oriented Home

While stories are important, the most impactful introduction to worldwide mission for MKs is their parents’ lives and ministries.

Partnering without Pressure

We don’t assume that just because our kids are growing up in a missions environment that they will one day be missionaries. Neither do we assume or impose on them the weight of the title ‘little missionaries.’ 

However, we know that our children are already learning missional living through watching us. We now step beyond watching, to participating and doing. We hope to engage them and invite them in; not forcing participation, but finding appropriate and optional ways to be involved in our ministry, according to their ages, interests, and giftings. 

As young MKs, for now, my children’s involvement means occasionally praying or singing in services in the church plant we lead in Brazil, as well as their favourite way to help — as Daddy’s assistants at weekly chess club. As they grow and continue to be open to this, we plan to increase their engagement and responsibility. It is important to us that they don’t feel the pressure to perform or be perfect, either in the places we serve or when visiting our sending churches.

Prioritizing MKs

Missionaries often, though unintentionally, put our children off missions and even God. Sadly, many adult MKs feel their childhood bore the brunt of their parent’s calling in lack of quality time with their missionary parents, feeling that their needs were always second to those of the people their parents served, feeling they were always on display and needed to be perfect, seeing profound suffering and hardship around them, and experiencing trauma, stress, and financial instability, to name a few. 

My husband and I read up on those pitfalls and work to avoid them, although we are mindful of our limitations and make plenty of mistakes of our own. We have come to understand the importance of listening and apologising when we get it wrong. Equally, as our children move towards adulthood, we expect them to take ownership of their lives and choices, irrespective of the childhood they had.

Missionary parents can be the most influential advocates for their calling to their children. By prioritizing quality family time and holidays, practising self-care, inviting their children to serve alongside them without pressure, including them in decision-making processes, and explaining the ‘why’ motivating their actions and choices, missionary parents can model missional living as a privilege rather than a burden — even amidst sacrifices and difficulties. In prioritizing family as our primary mission and maintaining a balanced life, we model a lifestyle that can attract them to missions.

The Gift of a Cross-Cultural Childhood

Despite growing up in a small, rural village at the foot of the North Downs, England, I lived near an agricultural college in a neighbouring village that drew in PhD students and their families from all over the world. It was only as a young adult that I began to appreciate how blessed I was to have had such an ethnically diverse group of childhood friends. 

When I was a very young child, one of these families became close family friends. They are Brazilian, and this must have been when God started to ignite in me a love for Brazil, which led me here as a teenager and to twenty years of serving in missions in Brazil. A childhood surrounded by a diversity of cultures is a good training ground for learning skills for missions like flexibility, open-mindedness, and even other languages.

The Gift of Growing Up in a Missionary Home

Missionary parents can invite their MKs into a conversation with a missionary who drops round or ask for their opinion on a mission-related subject that comes up. Kids overhear parents discussing how to respond to a challenge in ministry. We can see it as an opportunity to involve them, including asking their opinion during chats over the dinner table. 

Discuss the family’s missional giving with them. Ask them to contribute to newsletters. Attend and serve in a mission-hearted church. Our everyday interactions and conversations are their training ground. Parents know best the depth to go into challenging topics and the sensitivity of their child. Whilst even young children can contribute to decision making, the parents make the decision, bearing everything in mind.

Inviting and Involving Your Children

Many MKs have an interest in global affairs. My husband and I take prayer points from the global news to bring to our family intercession time. Creative prayer ideas like prayer chains, drawing, or prayer calendars can make prayer more interactive. 

My husband makes annual visits to South Sudan, and my six-year-old, who is the only member of the family yet to visit, has begun to learn a few Dinka phrases. We cook South Sudanese recipes and pray for friends, pastors, and communities we know. The kids chat to those friends on video calls. My eight-year-old loves Japan. And because she is interested, we order in sushi and learn origami, and she learns Japanese on a language learning app. We attend some missions fairs, conferences, and events with them. 

Children can tithe to missions by setting aside a portion of their monthly pocket money specifically for a mission worker or mission project of their choice. Once, after leading children’s activities on missions at one of our sending churches, the kids surprised us with an offering and gathered around to pray for us and our MKs.

How about connecting with another MK and finding out about their host country’s culture and parent’s ministry through emails and photo journalling? Or re-gifting toys and books they have grown out of to the children of a local mission worker? Or simply inviting your MK to interview you during some sending church visits? There are so many creative ways to engage their interest, to invite them in and involve them deeper in missional living.

An MK’s childhood is a crucial moment to support and train them in godly, missional living. Like arrows, sharpened and released into a broken world (Psalm 127:4), we direct them to carry the transforming gospel message and make a lasting impact on the nations. Nurturing an MK’s love for missions requires the same intentionality as any other area of their discipleship. They are our inheritance and gift: a blessing to us and to the world. We pray that their lives — shaped by our stories and the stories we tell them — would become the next story that inspires others to love God and to love missions.

 

Use the discount code MISSIONKIDS25 to receive 25% off the paperback, hardback, and ebook editions of Perfect Peace Child and God’s Child at Mission Kids. Offer valid through February 28, 2026.

If at All Possible, Take Them Home

The tears started when we got out of the tuk tuk and stood at the edge of our old neighborhood. My teen girls wanted to meander from the main road, down the hill, around the corner. They wanted to walk slowly home, taking it all in and letting the memories come as they may.

We were five years late, but we had come home.

Our furlough was supposed to last from April to August of 2020. As the world began to shut down, we talked with our medical advisors and bumped our flights up to mid-March; we packed our suitcases, wore our masks, hoped all six of us would remain fever free, and boarded our flights from Phnom Penh to Taipei to San Francisco to Kansas City. The flight board in Taipei was nearly all red, full of cancelled flights. Thankfully, TPE to SFO was on time.

We didn’t know it then, but this was how we were wrapping up eight years of life and living in Asia.

About a month into our time in the States we realized the doors were closing on Cambodia. We cried, we planned, we wept. We ate a lot of ice cream.

And we did our best to end well during a global pandemic and without the chance to say goodbye in person. Our kids kept meeting with their international youth group virtually, we used Google maps to “walk” down our streets, we tried to do what we could while also figuring out how to survive in the vastly altered America we had just landed in.

***

But now, five years later, I saw my girls enthralled with the country of their youth. They were coming back to their childhood, and they were loving it. During the late-night taxi drive from the airport, they rolled down the windows and said it felt like they never left. The sharp smells, the weight of the air, the Khmer throngs, the Chinese neon blinking signs.

We went to the Japanese mall where our family spent many Saturdays, we walked through the Russian Market and bought trinkets and shirts. Some of our favorite restaurants had had to shut down during the pandemic, but some made it through, so we ate and ate and ate. We were tourists who didn’t feel like tourists.

We went to our old church, a place where we all experienced the beauty and complexity of the global, international Kingdom. We were the last ones there that Sunday, walking around the church compound, remembering hot Sundays playing in the grass and eating samosas from our Pakistani friends.

My girls loved hearing Khmer again and feeling the humidity and swimming late into the night. They loved the French pastries, leftovers from a not-too-distant colonial time. They said the visit changed their memories of Cambodia, that when they thought back of Cambodia now, it wouldn’t be all loss and empty space and a shapeless goodbye. Their memories would now include long walks with teenage eyes, good hugs, the beauty of long friendships across oceans, and laughter at how our 7th floor hotel room flooded because the bidet exploded while we were touring the Royal Palace.

***

When we walked down the hill and turned the dusty corner of our street, we were known. Our old neighbors, cooking and chattering away outside their houses, saw us from several blocks away and started waving their hands wildly. They welcomed us back so sweetly and with such smiles; I will cherish their gift for a lifetime. They asked about the family, about America, about work. They showed us how five years had grown their children too. We visited with our old landlord, who surprised us with an invitation to walk through our old row house.

We climbed the stairs, peered into the old spaces where we lived. The girls saw some of their old furniture, repurposed now by a Cambodian family. They went out on the little patio, my youngest’s first “garden,” the place where she first tended to living things. What a beautiful, unexpected, wonderful gift.

The trip was so much better than I had even hoped. I knew I wanted to get them there; for five years I had known that somehow, someway, I needed to get them there. And I am so grateful.

***

We stood at the Phnom Penh airport, departure tickets in hand, and breathed. The girls wanted to recreate the last photo we took in Cambodia in 2020: at the top of the escalators, just before immigration, looking down on the airline check-in counters. Arched ceilings framed reliefs of Cambodian scenes. The girls are much taller in these new photos, and their smiles are older too.

We were all sad again, a little bit. And we were happy too. This time, we were leaving a Cambodia that had been home, that still felt like home in many ways, and we were also going home. Soon, we knew we would land at a little airport in Southwest Missouri that would also feel familiar. We would greet the rest of the family and tell all the stories. We would go to church on Sunday, a place with dear friends and kind hearts where we, once again, feel known and cared for and seen. The global church, it turns out, is in Missouri too, with all her beauty and complexity.

We would recover from jet lag in our own beds, and we would sit around our own table once again and laugh and laugh. There aren’t palm trees outside, and we can’t usually smell our neighbor’s dinner. The air isn’t thick year-round with humidity and incense, and there are no geckos. But we can walk down our not-so-dusty street. We can fall in love with the four seasons of an American Midwest. We can drive to our new favorite Asian restaurant. We can still live.

Because, wonder of wonders, after traveling there and back again, we have come

Home.

It is not always possible to return to a once-loved place. For ideas on what to do when you can’t go back, check out The Day We Didn’t Go Home. Also, if you’re not familiar with TCK Training and all their excellent resources, visit their website at tcktraining.com. Marilyn Gardner has written a beautiful piece for adult third culture kids on returning home: So, You Want to Go Back ‘Home’?

I asked a lot of questions during our trip: Has anything surprised you? What is this like for you? Is there anything left undone? What are the things you really need to do here or the places you really need to go? I didn’t really have much of an agenda at all, and I didn’t really try to anticipate what they would want or how they would feel.

After the trip, I asked one of my daughters for her advice to families making a return trip. “Let the feelings feel,” she said. “Let it be happy if it’s happy, and let it be sad if it’s sad. And if the feeling’s anger or frustration, let that be too.”

Do Your Kids Like It?

by Abi Little

Here is a tricky question to answer: ‘Do your kids like living in Cambodia?’

I was asked this question so many times last year when we were in the UK. It is such an important question but not one that is easy to answer.

It’s hard to explain the nature of moving your kids to another nation yet knowing they are likely to go back to nation number one eventually. Once you choose one transition, you inevitably choose many more. Domino effect.

The first thing I always say is that both of our kids would answer this question differently. The youngest came here when she had just turned five. Many of the ways she analyses and interacts with the world is very Cambodian in style. She knows to be respectful of older people, but she plays out with the local kids every day, speaking pigeon Khmer whilst using anything they can find to create elaborate and messy games. She has an accent which isn’t European or Asian but isn’t British either. 

And when we were in the UK, we joked that she was like a foreigner in a new land. She made comments like ‘I didn’t know there were fat brown cows in England’ and ‘Superdrug? What on earth do they sell in there? Drugs?’ My favourite statement was: ‘I don’t like trains. I always feel they are going to go without me. The tuk tuks wait for us!’

Does our youngest daughter like Cambodia? Yes, very much because she was young enough when we arrived to adjust quickly. Does she like England? Yes, very much so. But when we visit, we only do nice things. What would she make of ‘real’ life?’ What will she feel when she eventually returns? She will probably find it a huge adjustment. As will we.

How about our older daughter? She had just turned eight when we arrived and was very much attached to her life in the UK. She loved her school and her friends, our church, and, of course, family. She was always able to maturely articulate the loss she felt when we moved. But still, she got on with life in Phnom Penh. She made beautiful friends, but then those friends left. (People come and go so often here.) Then we moved again. I know I felt huge amounts of guilt for this. But she has grown into such a dynamic, funny, hardworking, kind and interesting human. 

About eighteen months ago, she told me she finally felt that God had a purpose for her in Cambodia too, not just for us, and that she was glad we had come here. 

She has beautiful friends, she loves church, and she has had amazing opportunities. But her heart is still divided. However, even at almost fourteen years old she can now, not only articulate well what she has lost, but can also recognise all that she has gained. 

Our children are and will always be TCKs. Third Culture Kids. They no longer inhabit their first culture, and they don’t entirely own their second one. They will always be shaped by both and identify in different ways with each. That’s not easy. 

Children face change even if they stay in one place. But we recognise that the change we effectively caused them to go through was huge and will impact their futures. For the good, yes, and also for the heartache that will inevitably come—for there will be loss again. That is hard to live with as a parent. But that doesn’t mean we made the wrong decision. It’s way more complex than that. 

My husband Sam and I agreed we would always be understanding, kind, and loving when they expressed their feelings about this move or the next. That their feelings (even if they felt/feel upset with us) are fair and valid. 

So, do our children like Cambodia? Yes, very much. Is it easy to be a TCK? No, it has its challenges. Are there rewards? Absolutely! 

But is it easy to handle change? For most, no. But aren’t there amazing and exciting and wonderful things to be learned when we go on an adventure such as this? To be surrounded by people who teach us new ways, new perspectives, new values? What a blessing. 

Our kids are TCKs. Our kids are our kids (and in many ways they are like us). Our kids are robust because of their varied and unusual experiences. And our prayer is that God will use it all for good. 

Do our children like Cambodia? Yes! Do they like England? Yes! Are they glad they are TCKs? Yes and no. What does this make us as parents? Well, as Christian parents we trust that God has a plan for their lives and He will guide their paths, and we hope to help with that. 

So do our kids like Cambodia? Yes! And . . .

~~~~~~~

Abi and her husband, originally from the UK, have lived in Siem Reap, Cambodia, with their two children for six years. Three years ago, they founded Grace Church Siem Reap, a bilingual, multicultural church. Abi also established Devoted to Cambodia two years ago, a charity offering free English lessons to children living near the provincial dump. By improving their English, students gain access to safer, better-paid jobs in Siem Reap’s tourism industry, helping families break the cycle of poverty (See Littles in Cambodia on Facebook).   

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

 

Could God Be Preparing TCKs to Meet the Deepest Needs of This Generation?

Motherhood photo by Mukil Menon.

Growing up overseas offers children an incredible opportunity to develop a global perspective based on the lived experiences of forming personal connections across cultures. I’ve certainly seen that unfold from my own childhood, and in my work as an expat consultant, I’m watching the next generation carry forward a global mindset that is making an exceptional impact on relationships, identities, and a strong witness for Christ. But this doesn’t happen by accident. 

My own story began as an American child living in Cameroon, where my parents served as Wycliffe Bible translators. Our missionary life started the day our ivory family of six spilled out of our Nissan truck and into the lives of an ebony clan who would become family, changing me forever. Two decades earlier, an elder of their village had written a plea to Wycliffe for a Bible translation in his language. He unknowingly forged the path that would make me a Third Culture Kid — someone who spent a significant amount of their childhood years abroad. 

Growing up in Cameroon shaped me profoundly. It made other people’s experiences anything but distant. News of war in Africa wasn’t a faceless story. I shared life with people who were killed or displaced in Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis. My husband is a TCK whose family lived through not one, not two, but several evacuations from war-torn countries. The people who experienced days without potable water, dehydration, hushing their babies while hiding in the bush, homemade bombs going off at social gatherings, retribution for speaking out, the terrible silence of ghost towns, and the wailing of women were not nameless people in a news article to me. 

A childhood spent with these people also made their joys anything but distant. The children they birthed were babies I carried on my back and celebrated when they brought home their first report cards. Witnessing the people of my childhood hold the Word of God in their own language for the first time wasn’t just a media post I swiped past. It was sacred and deeply moving — the culmination of sharing 20 years of my family’s life with a community that fed me beans from the same bowls as their children, taught me their songs and stories around kitchen fires, boiled herbal medicine when I was sick, and cried shouts of joy when they hugged me home from boarding school. They were worth sacrificing for, and they felt the same way about us.

Growing up between worlds gives children the chance to experience the love, joy, loss, pain, and victory of our global neighbors in a deeply personal way — one that often moves them to action later as adults. Often unaware of their own strengths, Adult TCKs tend to be highly sought after in today’s job market due to essential skills that were developed as a result of their globally-mobile childhood. 

According to wealth management companies Creative Planning International and Sable International, ATCK skills include compassion, empathy, adaptability, open-mindedness, independence, resilience, problem-solving, and the ability to consider multiple perspectives.1 These qualities are increasingly rare and extremely attractive in a Western backdrop marked by divisiveness, screen saturation, and overstimulation. This growing recognition is fueling the rise of world schoolers, families who choose to work remotely to provide real-world, cross-cultural experiences as the foundation for their children’s education.

Globally raised children are poised to make a significant impact on the next generation on a spiritual level too. Their experiences abroad foster carefully curated skills that will directly address the projected societal deficiencies of Gen Alpha. Experts predict that Gen Alpha will face psychological challenges from digital lives, including unsustainable pace, relentless change, lack of genuine connection, lack of face-to-face contact, risk-aversion, real-world interaction deficiencies, fragmented attention, and more.2 Additional challenges include social fragmentation, polarization, and difficulty forming meaningful relationships. We already see warning signs of this in Gen Z.

God’s heart for all people compels us to prepare ourselves and our kids with the tools necessary to minister to each generation’s unique challenges. 1 Timothy 2:3-4 reminds us of the breadth of God’s heart: “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”3 So, how will we reach them?

I believe today’s TCKs are uniquely positioned to minister to Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s challenges with a clarity of the gospel that is a direct result of their global upbringing. TCK Training’s 2024 survey of 1,643 adult TCKs representing 92 nationalities uncovered exciting information about the third culture kid experience.4 Their strengths align remarkably well with the skills needed to meet future challenges:

  • 93% of adult TCKs report having a broad worldview — a crucial skill in addressing complex spiritual questions in an information-saturated generation.
  • 83% see themselves as bridges between cultures — a critical capability in holding the core truth of scripture in tension with an increasingly polarized culture.
  • 83% report compassion as a strength — a necessary trait as Gen Alpha is projected to be more deficient in meaningful face-to-face contact than previous generations.
  • 82% report adaptability — an essential skill as Gen Z and Gen Alpha face complex issues with unprecedented access to information.
  • 78% report open-mindedness — an important tool in an increasingly globalized world. 

When I consider the reported strengths of TCKs, I can’t help but wonder if God is purposefully building Gen Z and Gen Alpha TCKs to minister to the wounds of their own generation. Is it possible that God will use their upbringing between cultures to bridge the gap and equip them with a profound clarity of the lived gospel? Might this powerfully shake the world and bring healing to our spiritual sickness? 

But here’s the caveat. This only holds true when it’s done well. 

Over the last few generations, the international community has learned painful lessons about the importance of intentional parenting in the expat context. We would do well to learn from what works and what doesn’t in raising kids abroad. While the TCK experience offers a valuable and rich foundation, mishandling it can lead to grave repercussions. TCKs are at higher risk for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) than other populations, which can result in long-term physical and mental health complications when left unattended.5 

Does this mean parents should avoid raising children abroad? Absolutely not. 

Consider this analogy: I’m at risk for plantar fasciitis. Should I avoid walking, hiking, or running? Recent studies show that a sedentary lifestyle is as harmful to my health as smoking and diabetes. In fact, not exercising was found to increase risk of death by 500%.6 Avoiding exercise is not the answer to my fullest and healthiest life. Instead, I researched triggers and mitigating factors and pursued an active lifestyle while investing in supportive shoes, stretching, and taking breaks when I detected pain.

In the same way, parents can raise TCKs while addressing specific risks and implementing mitigating factors. Due to mobility, the number one risk factor for TCKs is loss of connection—with primary caregivers and with community. Stress for parents, frequent moves, and the loss of familiar environments all heighten this risk.

This is where the power of TCK-informed parenting comes in. If loss of connection is the primary risk factor for TCKs, what would happen if TCK connection were centralized in the expat community? 

In 2019, Dr. Christina Bethell conducted a study of 6,188 people at John Hopkins to determine which childhood factors built resilience instead of fragility in adult mental health.7 She found that even children who had experienced mild to severe trauma in childhood went on to have greater resilience and better mental and emotional health in adulthood if they also had positive connections with primary caregivers, peers, and the community.8 The study further showed that Positive Childhood Experiences, or PCEs, had a cumulative effect in that the more PCEs a child had, the greater their health in adulthood.

This study’s impact on preventive care science leaves us with hope that increasing access to PCEs may alter the trajectory of children at risk for trauma and higher ACE scores. It further explains the significant and lasting difference that caregivers and the community make in raising a healthy generation.

The eight PCEs are:

  1. The ability to talk with family about feelings.
  2. The sense that family is supportive during difficult times.
  3. Feeling safe and protected by an adult in the home.
  4. Feeling supported by friends.
  5. Feeling a sense of belonging in high school.
  6. Participating in community traditions.
  7. Having at least two non-parent adults who genuinely cared (Pinetree Institute).
  8. Belonging to a multi-generational group. 

Each of the PCEs center on connection, starting with the primary caregiver and then extending to the wider community. Children who consistently had 6-7 PCEs were 72% less likely to develop mental illness in adulthood. Those who had 3-5 were 50% less likely to develop depression and poor mental health.9 Everyone plays a stewardship role in building vibrant childhoods — from parents, to peers, and the wider community. 

Many of us in the expat community are painfully aware of crash-and-burn stories of TCKs whose needs were put on the backburner in a passionate pursuit of global work. Even armed with these insights as a TCK mom, I was not immune to my own blindspots and moments of disconnection. However, as an expat family instructor, I am deeply encouraged by today’s TCK parents and their strong commitment to centralize the needs of the family as a launching point for effective ministry, not a secondary consideration.

It is true that TCKs are at higher risk than other populations for a high ACE score largely due to mobility and loss of connection. Yet the good news is clear: Positive Childhood Experiences grounded in meaningful relationships have a protective and lasting effect. Even in the face of adversity, children who experience strong family bonds, supportive friendships, and a sense of belonging are significantly more resilient and healthy.

As an expat parent, it is within your hands to nurture your child’s potential to become spiritually whole themselves before becoming a globally aware citizen who brings God’s healing touch to their generation. It starts with TCK-informed parenting — knowing the risks, focusing on connection, and raising spiritually and emotionally vibrant children. The stakes are too high to remain uninformed.

If you would like to know where to start, here are resources I recommend.

Footnotes
1 Sengelmann, Peter. Benefits of Living Overseas with Children. Creative Planning International. (September 23, 2024). Accessed 01/29/2025; Shrosbree, Leanne. 10 reasons growing up abroad gives your children a head start in life. Sable International. (June 6, 2019). Accessed 01/29/2025.
2 Nellis, Joe. What does the future hold for Gen Alpha? Cranfield Executive Development. Accessed 01/28/2025; Haidt, Jonathan. End the Phone-Based Childhood Now. The Atlantic. (March 13, 2024). Accessed 01/29/2025.
3 English Standard Version Bible. Bible Gateway. Accessed 02/08/2025.
4 Crossman, T., Wells, L., Vahey Smith, E., & Kanabar, S. (2025, January 20). First Look: Data from the 2024 Survey on the Impact of Childhood Global Mobility on Adult Wellness, 52. Retrieved from https://www.tcktraining.com/research/first-look-data-from-the-2024-survey
5 Ibid., 9.
6 Mandal, Anaya. Not exercising is worse than smoking, diabetes or heart disease finds study. News Medical Life Sciences. (October 21, 2018). Accessed 01/28/2025.
7 Bethell C, Jones J, Gombojav N, Linkenbach J, Sege R. Positive Childhood Experiences and Adult Mental and Relational Health in a Statewide Sample: Associations Across Adverse Childhood Experiences Levels. JAMA Pediatr. (2019):e193007. Accessed 02/01/2025.
8  Pinetree Institute. Positive Childhood Experiences (PCES). Accessed 02/01/2025.
9 Bethell C, Jones J, Gombojav N, Linkenbach J, Sege R. Positive Childhood Experiences. JAMA Pediatr. (2019):e193007. Accessed 02/01/2025.

 

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

Photo by Mukil Menon, Unsplash.

Co-Grieving Loss with Your Repatriated TCK

We didn’t have words for TCK loss back then. Not when I left Cameroon at nineteen and stepped onto U.S. soil as a stranger to my own country. But just because there weren’t words doesn’t mean the ache of loss didn’t burrow deep. Nineteen and newly repatriated felt like drowning in a sea of people who looked like me and talked like me but didn’t know the red-earth-Africa that shaped me. 

I hardly recognized the girl I became in the wake of losing Cameroon, my best friends, and everything that felt familiar. That season was one of the hardest – and one of the unhealthiest – of my life.

Now, after the years have fast forwarded to an empty nest, I find myself looking back, not just at my own story but at theirs. I think of my children, my third culture kids, who built rich and beautiful lives on South African soil, their home. How will they handle letting go? How will they carry the weight of leaving behind the people and places that shaped them?

When I saw Megan Norton’s invitation to write a letter to my recently repatriated TCKs for her upcoming book, Letters Now Sent, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I know the grief of leaving a place that tattoos an indelible mark on your soul. As their mother and as a TCK myself, I want to co-grieve their losses of saying goodbye to a life they loved in South Africa. And I know where I want them to root themselves now, as they step into adulthood in the U.S.

This letter is a new beginning with new language for parents of TCKs. It is my way of opening the door to a safe and sacred conversation with my young adult children—one established in love, shared understanding, and the kind of hope that reroots through the cracks of even the hardest losses. While their reactions to my letter are deeply personal and honey to my heart, I can tell you that this budding conversation was met with warm reciprocity and open arms. 

A letter to Elaina and Sawyer Danforth, 2025 (republished at A Life Overseas with permission) 

My two dearest toasted marshmallows,

You are eighteen and nineteen now. University carries a steep learning curve for everyone, but especially for the ones like you who left home, country, and friends to be grafted back to the place of your heritage. 

As second-generation TCKs, you belong to a tribe that your father and I know well. Your childhood was formed in the womb of the cradle of humankind, in KwaZulu-Natal, and it ended abruptly on the other side of a plane ride to the United States. But the things that formed you there still sing in every crevice of your mind and shape the way you see the world. 

Repatriation is a season when the losses of the familiar sink in hard for TCKs. And these are the years when you become aware of your roots, the ones that have been transplanted to new soils and now feel wildly distinct and out of place. The places of your childhood are the places where your formative and deepest roots grow. And the soil of South Africa no longer surrounds or supports you. 

You’ll remember from working on our farm that a transplanted plant often wilts for a while. It is learning to survive in a new and unfamiliar environment. Its roots aren’t sure what to make of its new home. They don’t know whether they can unfurl and take new life or whether the newness will be hostile to growth. Repatriating TCKs are the same. 

While my roots in South Africa will never be as deeply formative as yours, I am here to co-grieve your losses with you. I did the same as a nineteen-year-old with my Cameroonian roots. And your father did too, at eighteen with his Congolese and Central African roots. 

Some losses are obvious. Our imperfectly perfect little farmhouse and the stability of its cracked walls. The foamy blueness of whales flirting between the horizon and the Indian Ocean. The oneness of our multicultural, multi-lingual farm family. The wind-whipped cheeks from four-wheeling wild past giraffes. The saggy eyes after Minecraft all-nighters with friends. The laughter with your non-blood sisters farmsteading in the mountains. The crispy-edged pancakes hot off the griddle every Saturday morning. The seasonal ebb and flow of subtropical downpours and droughts. 

But some losses are hidden. Some, you won’t even know you miss until you come across them years later. And you’ll be caught off guard by a sudden feeling of home. Hidden losses are the sounds, smells, and invisible things that God sprinkled into the backdrop of your childhood. They are the things that you didn’t even know weren’t everywhere on planet earth. Until they weren’t. 

Your hidden losses don’t have to make sense to anyone else. They don’t even have to be pleasant. But something about these background sounds and smells had a profound impact on developing the unseen part of who you are today. And we honor those gifts by naming them. 

The background sound of your childhood is the cry of hadedas filling pink southern skies and beckoning your sleepy eyes open. You didn’t even know the sound was missing until that first morning in a Midwest dormroom when the synthetic shock of an alarm clock demanded your attention. 

It is the faithful singsong Xhosa greeting “Molweni” on your proud farm stoep. It is the mourning doves telling each other off gently and sternly. It is the inexplicable peace of violent rains threatening to crash right through tôle roofs. It is the baying of hounds, whether to threaten skelems or to give chase to dassies, outside your burglar-barred window. 

It is the South African flavor in which people have always said your name. It is the twisted, segregated history healing in real time through the harmony of church songs in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu. It is the comfort of our family’s age-old call to meals that reaches back to the recesses of your first independently held spoon, “On va prier.”

The background smell embedded in the roots of your childhood is a eucalyptus flame licking Karoo lamb ribs on the braai. It is soft buttermilk vanilla steam from an Ouma rusk dunked in Five Roses tea. How can something be so moorishly crunchy and goopy at the same time? It is the barely-there salt in the air where the Indian Ocean laps at the sky. And yes, it is even the familiar sewage plant every time we try to hold our breath at that bend in the highway by Uvongo.

Your roots will fumble around in this new place of red, white, and blue for a while, figuring out what is friendly soil and what isn’t. And this is the time. Dit is tyd to close your eyes, take a breath, and rediscover the power of your one unshakable tap root. It is your deepest root. The most formative one. The most familiar one. The most stabilizing one. It is your one root that pushes far past all the others, past every good and rocky soil, reaching like life depends on it, to the source of life. Water. Living Water. 

It is in Living Water that you’ve always found life and truth and all that is good. When everything around is unfamiliar, this source is the familiar. 

You’ll find community in the taproots of familiar people planted there too. And you’ll come to know new people who are automatically family because their taproot seeks life in the same place where yours does. This is the good stuff, my toasted marshmallows. 

While your secondary roots stumble around and try to make sense of star-spangled life, sink all your energy, all your questions, all your everything into your taproot’s source of life. It is the one and only thing that will never change no matter where you go, how far you fall, or how unfamiliar everything else seems. 

Taprooted to the Source with you,

Mom (Anna Danforth)

~~~~~~~

Inspired by Ruth Van Reken‘s book Letters Never Sent, Letters Now Sent will be a collection of letters from TCKs, parents of TCKs, and system leaders to share personal stories about their experiences with TCKs, being a TCK themself, and/or raising TCKs. This book is a fusion of both memoir and anthology written in a specific “Dear [name]” format. 

Here is the Google Form link to submit a letter with additional details about length and content prompts: https://forms.gle/jQyzq3TtFqfyznvCA. The deadline to submit a letter is March 31, 2025, and the book will be launched in July 2025 at Ruth’s 80th birthday celebration. Families in Global Transition is hosting the 80th Birthday party in Chicago on July 26, 2027, and registration will be live on their website soon. You do not have to be a member of FIGT to register for this event.

A Loving Letter to Missionary Parents

Missionary parents, I want to begin by honoring you and affirming you.

You are raising families in complicated cross-cultural settings that are at once exhilarating and exhausting. You’re managing so much: the pressures of work and language-learning and support-raising and communicating with your ministry partners and learning the intricacies of assimilating to new places and reinventing the wheel every day while maintaining your core values and sense of purpose.

You’re constantly evaluating and redirecting, finessing, pushing through, and educating yourselves—all while striving to be present and engaged parents to your children, who themselves are going through a “purple” version of what you’re experiencing, without the clarity of having been grounded in one culture during their formative years. (See this article for an explanation of purple.)

I want you to know that your courage and commitment, your juggling and rejiggering, your galvanizing and growth are seen and celebrated! Your effort and stick-to-it-iveness are beautiful.

At the same time, I want to draw your attention to something you may not be fully aware of. Consider it a glimpse into something that may be happening in your MKs without your knowledge.

This cautionary message was brought into focus for me as I watched the recent Summer Olympics. Like millions of spectators, I was glued to the coverage of the US Women’s Gymnastics team’s comeback in Paris. Between footage of soaring, twisting, and miraculously landing athletes, the channel I was following showed just a few seconds of the watch party at the World Champions Centre in Texas, where Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles have perfected their trade.

The brief clip pulled me up short. I wound it back a couple times, enchanted by the pint-sized gymnasts sitting on the floor in front of the television, mimicking every pose and facial expression of their heroes competing on the big screen. The announcer explained that both the children and the superstars train together, and almost by osmosis, the younger athletes end up learning the entire routines—move for move—of the women they hold in such high esteem.

Like those tumbling tykes at the World Champions Center, the children observing ministry’s pommel horse and uneven bars are learning about life by observing and, even unconsciously, internalizing the “routine” they see you performing.

This can particularly be true when it comes to faith, and the domino effect of what they witness can run the gamut from elevated spiritual awareness to diminished spiritual interest.

I had a Zoom conversation a while ago with an adult MK. Her name is Laura, and I share this part of her personal journey with her permission. Laura is twenty-six. She has a great job in the medical field. She’s in a stable relationship and loves her nieces and nephew. She gives back by working for a local charity that provides groceries and fuel to families living in underserved communities.

Laura is well-spoken, insightful, kind, welcoming, and generous—everything you’d expect her to be, having grown up multi-culturally, steeped in the values of a family devoted to serving.

But she doesn’t want anything to do with God. And an uncomfortable, pained expression crosses her face when the topic of ministry comes up.

Laura finds God neither appealing nor necessary. She laughed when I asked her to explain how she got there. The problem, she said, wasn’t a dearth of information. God had saturated her life from earliest memory. Even her bedroom wallpaper, before her family headed to South Central Asia, depicted scenes from Noah’s Ark and Eden.

Laura knows all the stories, but as she grew up observing the missionary world, the character of God became confusing to her.

On a good day, God was the “boss” who gave her parents their assignment—tasks to complete and events to plan. Jesus seemed to her to be her parents’ job. The name they tried to slip into conversations with the butcher at the market and the carpet salesman at their front door. The same name they uttered in perfunctory pre-meal family prayers that seemed more habit than gratitude—except when others were watching and the prayers morphed into Psalm’esque poetry.

On not-so-good days, God’s persona felt like something ominous to Laura. The identities she described were painfully real to her but stand in stark contrast to the God I know.

God the dictator—he made her family move six times in seven years, twice to a place her parents didn’t want to move but did, only because they were the only solution to an urgent need.

God the miser—the family prayed and prayed for better income, and still support flagged. There was one particularly memorable evening when their home group spent time interceding for their financial needs, and while they were praying an email came through finalizing the discontinuation of support from one of their main partner churches. The irony of the timing was not lost on Laura.

God the taskmaster—rest was slothful in Laura’s family and community. The God she was shown despised leisure and immobility. Laura witnessed her parents so fixated on endless ministry demands that their ability to be present with their children—aware of their needs and engaged in their growth—was limited.

God the exploiter—Laura’s father had to seek medical help for work-related exhaustion. Twice. He was hospitalized for a few days the second time, and Laura feared she’d lose him to heart issues that hadn’t existed prior to the stress of ministry. His chief concern while lying in bed hooked up to monitors? The tasks adding up while he waited for tests to be run.

God the isolator—whether it was entertainment, friendships, or aspirations, everything in Laura and her two sisters’ lives had to be overtly spiritual in order to be approved of. If it wasn’t, there would be no participation allowed for them. Birthday parties, school outings, even reading—it all had to be God-centered, or it would be parent-denied. God’s grip over their lives eventually caused what Laura called “religious isolation” or the inability to exist in external community.

There were equal parts sadness and anger in Laura’s voice as she recited her litany of dark God-images. What she had learned about God, she’d learned from observing her parents. And her parents may not have realized what she was witnessing in them. What they’d unwittingly taught her was that the One they served was a tyrant who required malignant levels of output from a family he failed to protect and provide for.

He seemed to Laura to be all disinterest and demand.

I tried to keep my voice neutral as I asked Laura a series of questions. Her answers were shrugs, head shakes, and the same one-syllable word.

Did you ever see your parents resting in God’s love and provision?

Did you see your parents finding comfort in him?

Did you witness your parents wanting to spend unstructured time with him?

Did they ever articulate or demonstrate an intimate, life-giving relationship with him—beyond the toll of tasks and obligations?

No. On all counts—no.

I’ve had the same conversation with other MKs, and Laura’s response is sadly too common.

“But…they’re missionaries!” the idealist might say. Yes—and this is one of the grave dangers of God being a career choice. I know that terminology sounds cynical, but when ministry work overwhelms personal relationship with Jesus, faith can so easily cede to a form of mere religious employment.

Dr. John Trainer wrote: “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.”

As an MK who has worked with MKs for more than three decades, I can attest to the faith-preserving importance of that statement. The difference I see between children who were a demonstrable priority and those who were not is vivid.

Missionary parents, you are so commendable for following a calling into a life that is as unusual as it is unpredictable. An important life too—in eternal ways that are hard to measure from the present vantage point. I admire you so much! I also want you to know that your relationship with—not employment by—Jesus will inform your children’s faith in powerful and indelible ways.

The work you do and the sacrifices you make—your public sermons, service, and courage as you endure the desert-lands—will certainly contribute to what your children learn about God. But, like those young gymnasts following Simone Biles’s routine, they’re watching everything you do—perhaps especially outside of official obligations—and it’s in your abiding with Jesus (not performing, doing, or accomplishing) that they will catch a glimpse of what true faith is.

So have you talked with your children about conversations you’ve had with Jesus lately?

Have you mentioned in casual interaction that you’re seeking his guidance on difficult decisions?

Have they seen you reduce some of your workload because it was getting in the way of quality time with him—and with them?

MKs need to learn by observing you about the benevolent goodness of God. They need to glimpse his heart for them in the way you rest in his heart for you. They need to understand his nearness and kindness by witnessing your vulnerability as you look to him for comfort, restoration, and inspiration. 

God’s primary calling on our lives is not that we overachieve for him, but rather that we live in intimate relationship with him. Those children watching faith’s “gymnastic routine” from the edge of your life’s tumbling mat are internalizing what they see and will likely repeat it. They’re learning who God is by observing your faith, and they’ll grow up to reflect what they’ve seen as they make their faith their own.

Dictator, miser, taskmaster, exploiter, isolator… These are nearly sacrilegious characteristics often unwittingly conveyed by grown-ups who don’t realize young souls are paying attention.

For the sake of Laura and others like her, I urge you to let your love for God, your enjoyment of his presence, and your dependence on his goodness shine more brightly than the list of obligations that metronome your days.

Treasure him above all else.

Bask in his kindness. 

Recuperate in his fullness. 

Rely on his strength. 

Display his love by finding fulfilment and satisfaction in your relationship with him, though tasks will always await and trials will always lurk. 

Demonstrate that he wants you to pause and refresh by doing exactly that—by stopping long enough to renew your strength and connect with your children.

Reveal his compassion for them and his attention to their needs by regularly considering the impact of your ministry on your own kids—debriefing honestly and regularly, individually and as a family, so you know where they stand and they know that you care.

Missionary parents, your children are watching. They’re seeing the miraculous, the life-changing, and the life-sapping.

I know you’re weary. I can’t imagine the balancing act of raising children while involved in taxing ministry.

I know your spirit often seems to bow under the weight of your responsibilities and burdens.

I know the life you’re chosen can be depleting in every way imaginable.

But that God you’re so frantically serving? You define him with every choice you make.

May his true heart be able to shine through the lived expression of your faith. And may your children hunger for what they see in you—the comfort and fulfillment of living in relationship with a mighty, close, and attentive God.

[To listen to the audio version of this and other articles, please click here.]

When Roots Don’t Stay Rooted

Somewhere along the way in this globally mobile life, I subconsciously and mistakenly adhered to the idea that other people – the non-globally mobile folks – don’t move. Our life is so chaotic in its never-ending transitions that I, apparently, fell into a false belief that no one else does what we do, not even a little bit.

Who else goes back and forth regularly between passport country and country of service, packing up belongings with practiced precision? To be on the move is part and parcel of the expat life. As we’ve spent the past several months in America for our home assignment, I’ve felt validated in the uniqueness of our globally mobile life because several people have told me as much. “You move around so much. We can’t imagine doing that.”

While it’s true that most people don’t move around so much, it’s also true that people do move. Which is what I apparently forgot, or didn’t want to believe, because it was better for my emotional well-being to lean on the assumed stability of those who stay put.

People who stay put offer an anchor to those of us who move around. When the anchor is pulled up, we don’t always know where to land anymore. 

So when my parents told us they’d decided to move from my hometown – the only place I’d grown up and the only place our family had landed during home assignments in the States – I suddenly realized how much I’d depended on their stability to extend itself onto us. Their rootedness had offered roots to us too, an anchor that I never imagined being pulled up.

I recently reread the story of Cain and Abel and found myself gobsmacked by Cain’s curse. While the first part is bad enough – the ground will no longer yield crops for him – it was the second part that haunted me: “You will be a restless wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12b).

The curse of Cain was to wander the earth, to be rootless, to have no particular place to call home. What a curse! To not know where you belong, to be unable to put down roots and thus consign your children to the same rootlessness as you with no sense of home. It’s no wonder Cain responded with, “My punishment is more than I can bear.”

The Lord’s punishment was just, as are all His judgements, yet I can’t help but feel empathy for the world’s first murderer. I never could have understood such a consequence before becoming a wanderer myself, albeit by God’s calling rather than His consequences. But what a shock to realize that God’s calling on my life was another person’s punishment.

Being unable to answer the question, “Where is home?” is a unique struggle that few people face. As expats, we sometimes even wear the struggle like a badge of honor, often reminding ourselves of the profound and comforting quote from Tolkien: “Not all those who wander are lost.”

Although Tolkien clearly meant that the journey can be its own end where we find meaning and purpose, and although I believe that to be true, it’s also true that some of those who wander are indeed lost. Some are wanderers, by definition, because they don’t know which way will lead them home.

That is how I feel. I am a wanderer, lost, unable to answer the question, “Where is home?” My answer to this question has become nearly as confusing and convoluted as my children’s answer, which attempts to explain that their parents are from different states and where they were born is different than where they live when they’re in America which is different from where they now live in Kenya which is different than where they used to live in Kenya.

Part of the problem is that American culture doesn’t clearly define “home.” In the culture where we live in Kenya, “home” is where the family hails from. No matter where you may travel or end up living, your home is at the shamba, the “home place” where your family has lived for generations. Granted, it’s relatively easy to define since most of the family doesn’t move anywhere – subsistence farmers tend to stay put. 

Still, it’s deeply entrenched in a person from the day they’re born that home is the land where the family is from, and anyone who does leave (for a job or school or whatever else) can come home anytime and be welcomed and feel at home. Furthermore, it’s expected that everyone will be buried at home, at the shamba. No matter where you are when you die, you should be buried at home to rest there forever.

I’ve acquired enough of an appreciation for this aspect of Kenyan culture to wish that my own American culture was more like it. It’s fairly easy for a Kenyan to answer the question, “Where is home?” I wish it were that easy for me.

The one place on earth that I feel most at home is my parents’ house, the one they are moving away from. If I were Kenyan, I could be buried there, preferably by the pond where the pine trees grow.

As I was processing and grieving the upcoming change that means I’ll never set foot in my childhood home again, I confessed to our kids that my parents’ house is where I feel most at home in the world. Our son instantly questioned me. “You don’t think [where we live in Africa] is home?” Well, yes, I do. But also, no. It certainly defines “home” for all five of us together, but would I want to be buried there? Probably not.

Even before the current rootlessness I feel, I’ve spent years helping our third culture kids think about home this way: “Whenever we’re together, we’re home.” Or another iteration: “Wherever we’re together, we’re home.” Home is not a place, but the people we are with.

As I cling to my people through this transition, I’m reminded that no matter how rooted or rootless we feel on this earth, not one of us is truly at home here. As C.S. Lewis so succinctly said, “We were made for another world.”

Psalm 90:1 says it best: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations.” Even those who have a shamba to return to where the family has lived for generations will never fully be at home. Our home is not a place, but a Person. The Lord alone is an anchor that will never be pulled up. His promises to me – to love me forever and never leave or forsake me – are the only roots I need.

In the same stanza with that famous Tolkien line about wanderers is another line: “Deep roots are not reached by the frost.” Deep roots – the deepest of roots – will not be reached by whatever in this world attempts to freeze them. Deep roots in Christ are not reached by the transitions of others. They are not reached by an inability to answer the question, “Where is home?” They are not reached by any fear or grief or loss of place.

Deep roots remain rooted. What a comfort that is to this sometimes restless wanderer.

Photo from Pixabay

 

The Future and Beyond! Preparing TCKs for College

by Kristi Steele

For most high schoolers, the “college” conversation doesn’t really begin until junior year or later. The situation isn’t that straightforward for families living outside their passport country. But matter where you live, there are great ways to prepare and maximize your conversations about the “after high school” options.

This matters deeply to me after growing up overseas as an MK with limited funds and maybe one college visit. My schooling was as varied as the many houses we lived in. I scoured scholarship applications, went to college, graduated, and worked in an international fair-trade business until I was hired as a college recruiter for international students and TCKs. In the almost five years I recruited students, I observed two things:

  1. Students who live outside the US are interested in what is next after high school, but they have limited opportunities to connect with resources, options, and experts. Understanding the collegiate search and admission process is hard no matter where you live, but it’s especially difficult when you live abroad.
  2. Opportunities to hear from universities and connect with them were few and far between.

After several years of students contacting me in the spring of their senior year, only to learn most of the scholarship money had been dispersed by then (and the conversation ending in tears), I stopped recruiting and started my own business (KC360.co). My goal and passion melded into one: helping and resourcing TCKs and international students to meet the needs I had observed. I believed we could improve the process for international families and perhaps mitigate a few of those tears.

But let me first say that college isn’t for everyone, and that is ok. We need everyone to walk the road they are uniquely created for because we want all of you in the places that bring you joy and connection. College is one avenue to those roads, but there are others too. So where you do begin?

For families of freshman and sophomores, the majority of your involvement in any college, gap year, trade school, or apprenticeship conversations should be just that: conversations. If you are near a university that is within your family, community, or support system, sign up for a college visit! It is great for students and families to visit a campus (not just drive through it), visit a class, eat in the cafeteria, and hear from admission professionals.

If you normally live abroad and are back in the US, take some time to give this experience to your student. (Feel free to visit universities abroad as well!) College visits are free and help students “feel” some of the nuances they may not know answers to – things like big campus or little campus, walkable or drivable, urban or smaller town, etc.

When families reach junior and senior year, there are some sizable shifts for students to prepare for college. We have an amazing task as parents to help prepare our students for adulthood by helping them slowly ease into this arena within the safety of our homes. Basic goals such as laundry, cooking a favorite meal or two, understanding a budget (how much money it takes for me to be my best self), are all important. Go a little farther if you can, and help them understand time management and goals.

These years are when conversations about college should turn into a bit of action: reflecting on whether college is for you, the types of majors and careers which may suit you, the financial picture of what it will look like for yourself and your family, and more.

Whether you are homeschooled, public schooled, private schooled, or a mixture of these, college search and admission can feel like a lot when you are overseas. Helping students navigate the process is what I have loved doing for almost a decade, and it is a joy.

Factoring in living abroad adds a new level of “interesting” to the plate. If you fall in this category, you and your student are not alone. Yes, there are complexities, but none which cannot be solved together with expert help. Not sure where to start? Here are some ideas:

  • Listen in to the free KC360 podcast for college search and admission insights in 15 minutes “bites” (you might hear a familiar voice!).
  • Unsure what to major in or where to even start in considering a college? Take a look at The College Project, a self-paced course for students to think through their options after high school, size of institutions, majors, careers, and build a college list and complete a college application strategy.
  • Overwhelmed by the finances of it all? The Scholarship Secrets course will help you understand the US financial aid system, uncover secrets to scholarships, and create a strategy to apply for them.
  • If access to universities is a frustration for you, join the free Virtual College Fair (September 30 – October 12, 2024) to hear from a variety of universities. Presentations are “on-demand” and can be watched in any time zone. The fair is open for two weeks to accommodate schedules, life, and so much more that enters into this season of our life! Register now here.
  • Access a free high school timeline for each grade and get helpful tips for your student and family.

My passion is for families to have resources which help them and make the college search and admission process less overwhelming. Being a global citizen has its challenges, and education is one of them. Know that you’re not alone and that there are resources to help you navigate even this road.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

As a TCK, a former college recruiter, and international education consultant, Kristi Steele created KC360 for international students and families just like you. KC360’s goal is to understand your family’s and student’s expectations for your college search and application journey. With a passionate commitment to TCKs and international students and experience in collegiate university recruiting, KC360 will assist and advise you throughout the college application process.