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Frankfurt, Germany<\/em><\/p>\n Having grown up multi-lingually on several continents, I\u2019ve never really been \u201cat home\u201d in any particular place, and have often felt a bit like a chameleon. I\u2019ve also eschewed (mostly unconsciously) being woven into a single community or cultural fabric. This likely explains why I live in the woods (without neighbors or a local community), yet have spent my life heavily involved in professional and global peer networks, and seem to have an ongoing \u201crestlessness to move\u201d and travel on a continual basis. I\u2019ve often used the ironic quip: \u201cIf you don\u2019t care where you are, you\u2019re never lost.\u201d as a truism I can really relate to. While being rootless does have its advantages (one tends to be more tolerant of others; adapting to new environs is easier) this identity struggle also brings a raft of other social and psychological issues along with it in its sojourns, including reverse culture shock<\/a> and a sense of disengaged melancholia.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until a few years ago that I discovered this phenomena has a taxonomy and name of its own\u2014Third Culture Kids<\/a>, often abbreviated \u201cTCKs\u201d or \u201c3CKs\u201d or \u201cGlobal Nomads,\u201d referring to \u201csomeone who, (as a child) has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture.\u201d By definition, \u201cthe TCK tends to build relationships to all cultures, while not having full ownership of any,\u201d and \u201cdevelops a sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n The concept of Third Culture Kids was introduced in the 1960s by Ruth Hill Useem<\/a> (1915-2003), a sociologist who used the term to describe children who spent part of their developmental years in a foreign culture due to their parents\u2019 working abroad.\u201d Her work was the first to \u201cidentify common themes among various TCKs that affect them throughout their lives.\u201d TCKs tend to have more in common with one another, regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCKs from their own country\u2014over the past decades, TCKs have become a heavily studied global subculture. (My cousin Faith<\/a>, also a TCK, authored\/edited the book Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global<\/em><\/a>, documenting \u201ca life of growing up in multiple nations, cultures, and language regions.\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cNot All Who Wander Are Lost.\u201d<\/em><\/span> \u2014JRR Tolkien (a TCK himself)<\/p>\n Old photos: I always had this thing for small cars (perhaps in reaction to the hulking \u2018Strassenkreuzer\u2019 Studebaker my parents shipped over to Germany); on our Stettenstrasse front stoop, my first day of school in Frankfurt. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Frankfurt, Germany Having grown up multi-lingually on several continents, I\u2019ve never really been \u201cat home\u201d in any particular place, and have often felt a bit like a chameleon. I\u2019ve also eschewed (mostly unconsciously) being woven into a single community or cultural fabric. This likely explains why I live in the woods (without neighbors or a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,7,10,11,13,14,15,17,18,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16909,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/598\/revisions\/16909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}