The Importance of Integration in the Transition of TCKs
By Betsy Scott
We transitioned this summer after 10 years of living abroad as a missionary family, specifically 9 years in Croatia and 1 year in France. Our 1st child was 4 years old when we moved to Europe. He is the child that the TCK (third-culture kid) books call “the fully integrated child.” He seems to be comfortable and fully able to navigate well both his passport culture and his new culture.
When we lived in Croatia he seemed like a Croatian child; he was fluent due to 7 years in the public school system and his accent was even fully a “Zagreb” one. When we were in the States he seemed like an American child, eating mac-n-cheese and using American slang. Even the transition back to the States has seemed seamless. He is getting good grades and everyone in our new church community tells me he seems to feel very comfortable. His Sunday school teacher told me he never seemed to be awkwardly on the outside, waiting to jump in, but rather he dove right in.
Of my two children, this child craves peer acceptance, which helps satisfy his deep need to feel secure in the world. So “seamless transitions” cover up a desperate desire to belong and to not be on the outside. The truth is that for years he developed ways of disguising himself, learning to be a chameleon and be whatever his environment needed him to be. In the midst of being seamless, where he dove in, signed up for, said hello to, internally he was still saying goodbye to his old life. My son didn’t just leave a place behind, he left a community, his peers, and in that culture, in many ways, friends who were truly brothers and sisters.
So recently we asked this seamless child if he missed anything about the world and people we just left. There was quiet. Then the answer finally came: “Of course I do.” Haven’t I so many times debriefed volunteers to help them to figure out how to build a bridge between the world they are leaving and the one they are now going to? Otherwise to move forward in a fragmented way is to move forward as a self-protecting false self, shutting off something inside of us, avoiding pain, shutting down our heart or what we have learned about ourselves. Living a truly integrated self allows the self to grieve and acknowledge the loss and at the same time acknowledging there is a new reality, a new self, being formed. The integrated self seeks to understand how to bring life to all sides of us and letting them inform and shape each other.
This Sunday at church my son was asked to help my husband do a Missions Sunday for the kids to teach them about Croatia and how God is moving there. He gets to share a language and a place he deeply loves with his new reality.
Recently, we visited the opening of our favorite coffee shop in Zagreb, in a city near us. We were giddy with excitement to have a piece of “home” in our new home. We spoke that day a bit of Croatian with the person selling us our coffee, as we knew him in the city we used to live in. Later that day my son began to speak Croatian with me. The former part was now coming back to life. Last week I came home to hearing Croatian; where my son was speaking with his friend from Zagreb on the phone. What sweet music it was to my ears. It hadn’t even occurred to me that in not hearing him speak a language I have primarily heard him speak for the last 9 years, that I too was missing that part of him. But also last weekend, he took an important step in his new life and asked if he could play at a new friend’s house after church for the afternoon. What I found interesting was that he didn’t take that step until the former life was nurtured and was coming back to life. In doing that it seemed to bring new life in his new world in the here and now.
Betsy is an Ordained Elder in the Church of the Nazarene. After being a missionary for 10 years, and transitioning to the States in August of 2019, she is now the Young Adult Coordinator at a Nazarene church in Pennsylvania and has just been accepted into a 2020 PhD cohort for Marriage and Family Therapy.
Become a member, and get a big discount on retreats!
