Third culture kid

A third culture kid (TCK) is someone who spent a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents' home culture. The term is credited to the sociologist Ruth Hill Useem and was popularised by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken. A TCK often feels connected to several cultures without belonging fully to any one.

Adults who grew up this way are sometimes called ATCKs.

What it means

The "third culture" is neither the parents' home culture nor the host country's. It is the in-between world that internationally mobile families share: international schools, expat compounds, frequent goodbyes and a habit of explaining where you are from.

TCKs often build their sense of belonging from relationships with others who have had similar lives, rather than from a single place.

Where the idea comes from

Ruth Hill Useem and her husband John Useem, both sociologists, began using the term after studying American families living in India in the 1950s. Useem later wrote about it with Richard Downie in a 1976 article, "Third-culture kids".

David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken's book Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, now in a third edition co-written with Michael Pollock, made the idea widely known. They described common gifts, such as adaptability and an easy curiosity about difference, alongside common challenges, such as rootlessness, restlessness and unresolved grief.

What it can look like in everyday life

Imagine being asked "Where are you from?" and feeling a small knot of panic. Your passport says one thing, your accent another. You spent primary school in Dubai, secondary school in Singapore and university in Manchester. Your parents speak of "home" meaning a place you visited for summer holidays.

Or imagine being the child of Sri Lankan parents who worked for international organisations. At family weddings in Colombo, aunties tease you about your accent and ask why you don't know certain customs. In London, colleagues see you as Sri Lankan. You feel faintly foreign in both rooms.

Or picture yourself at 30, with a good job in The Hague, feeling an itch to move every two or three years. Part of you wants to settle. Another part finds staying put strangely uncomfortable, as if the next goodbye is always due.

In person-centred counselling

TCK experiences rarely fit a neat story. There may be gratitude for a rich childhood and quiet sadness about friendships that ended every two or three years. There may be a sense of being an outsider even among people who look like you.

A person-centred counsellor does not need to sort these feelings into "good" and "bad". The aim is to give room to all of them, including grief that may never have been named, because moving was always presented as an adventure.

The identity and belonging topic explores these themes, grief far from home looks at loss across distance, and online therapy for expats explains how sessions work.

Related ideas

A TCK is different from an expat, who usually moves abroad as an adult with an established sense of home. It also differs from a second-generation immigrant, who usually grows up in one country while their parents came from another. Pollock and Van Reken use "cross-cultural kid" as a wider term that includes both TCKs and children of immigrants. TCKs are especially prone to reverse culture shock, since "going home" may mean moving to a country they never really lived in.