The issues cross-cultural teens and third culture kids face, and how to deal with them
- Being a teenager is complicated enough but for cross-cultural kids it becomes even harder to form an image of who they are
- Parents need to discuss with their children what it means to be a cross-cultural teen, asking who, where and what they identify with
I don’t feel like I fit in where I live. I find it hard to answer questions like “where are you from?” and “where is home?” I am having a hard time making new friends at school and I really miss my old ones.
These are some of the major issues faced by cross-cultural kids, says Anisha Abraham, an educator, researcher and paediatrician specialising in teen health, whose book Raising Global Teens: A Practical Handbook For Parenting in the 21st Century was published last month.
Cross-cultural kids are children and teens who have lived in, or interacted with, two or more cultural environments, Abraham, 51, says. “The concept focuses not just on mobility and location, but also on the many layers of cultural environments that can impact a child or teen.”
Globalisation has made it easier for people to move and find work all over the world, resulting in more children growing up in minority communities in adopted countries either as children of immigrants or expats, or as biracial kids.
Such an environment makes being a teenager even more complicated than usual. “Imagine having to not only answer the question ‘Who am I?’ but also ‘Who am I when I was born in one country but live in another, or when my parents come from another community than the one I live in, or my parents have two very different backgrounds?’” says Abraham, who has faced many of these questions herself as the daughter of South Asian immigrants living in the US.
Family, community and nationality are anchors of stability for adolescents, acting as mirrors for them to form an image of who they are and where they belong. For cross-cultural teens, these anchors are unstable.
