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.
