TCKs and creating a feeling of home

Living in Japan has opened some incredible doors for my family, including things like a very safe environment, a plethora of cultural traditions to enjoy, and the chance for my kids to grow up bilingual. In saying that, I've been thinking more and more about what it really means to raise a "third-culture kid" or TCK. The term was coined decades ago, and it describes children who spend their formative years outside the home country of their parents. It captures some of my worries that my children might grow up without a strong sense of belonging, and always feel like they're caught between different worlds.

TCKs live an experience that only a small group of people can really understand.

My own husband was very much a TCK, spending a bulk of his childhood here in Japan for his father's work, despite being American by nationality. He said that when he was back in the USA for his college years he felt incredibly out of place, and Japan still feels more like home than anywhere else in the world for him as a result. In part, that's probably why we have opted to stay here for as long as we have.

Stories from other TCKs echo this feeling, often mentioning the privilege of experiencing multiple languages and cultures, but also the nagging feeling that they don’t fully belong anywhere. In a piece I read about TCKs this week, one young woman shared how she loved learning languages while growing up in the Middle East, yet felt like an outsider when she returned to Colombia. Another grew up in Singapore, attending an international school that felt like its own bubble. Then when she visited India, she struggled to relate to relatives who hadn't lived abroad.

I already see hints of this in my own kids. When people ask where they're from, they answer "Japan," even though their clearly non-ethnically-Japanese faces often get laughs from people with that response. But Japan is all they've ever really known. As parents I think we all want our kids to thrive in this global life, but at the same time I really hope to give them a solid sense of home, even if that idea of "home" is a bit of a flexible term.

If you are parenting third culture kids, what do you do to provide that sense of "home" despite living outside your country of origin?