Temporary TCKid Home

One way I think helps us picture where TCKs fit into the grand scheme of things is by using colour.

Imagine cultures as colours. Culture Y is yellow and culture Z is blue.

A child growing up in one culture will feel they are yellow and a child growing up in the other will feel they are blue. A child who mixes in different cultures will be neither fully yellow or fully blue but green. Yet even then, they may change the colour they are to blend in with being yellow or blue. But there will be aspects of them that are different enough that the opposite colour shows through.

The difficulty for some TCKs is that their nationality is blue but they grow up in a yellow culture. Then they are expected to move to the blue nation which can be very difficult. It takes a long time if you are mostly yellow to absorb enough blue to be accepted as blue or feel at home living in a blue culture.

A TCK will probably relate to the culture that they have the most colour of. Perhaps they only have a little blue, then they will relate more to yellow. But the majority of TCKS will relate well to others who have a mixture of colours. Whatever shade of green they are, they share similar experiences of absorbing colour. Often it is only those who are green who can relate to what it is like to be green.

 

But I think it is important to realise that TCKs vary between their shading. The nearer a person is to one cultural colour, the more they will feel they are of that culture and the harder I believe it will be for them to relate to a TCK who is equally yellow and blue (green). The more green a TCK is, the more they will relate to someone who has experience blending colours than they will to either yellow or blue.

When colour is mixed, i think it is rarely fully green as culture but only green from a distance. Closer up, it is just a swirl of yellow and blue, yet it is the experiences of holding both blue and yellow that produce the third green experiences of the TCK. It is not necessarily the cultures that make the TCK but rather the experience of intermingling,experimenting, processing and relating to both yellow and blue. They are both blue and yellow, not fully either and the third culture (green) is not itself a culture, but an expression of processing multiple cultures.

Your thoughts…