Introduction
“I feel this certain level of kinship towards flight attendants. It could come out of my overwhelming thankfulness that they are serving me and are making my adventures possible. But I think, in reality, it is because they are just like me. Floating among borders. Making their home in the in-between. Never fully in one place, they, in themselves, are in their own timezone. But the result of this displacement is not just physical jet-lag. With every flight, you stretch your sense of belonging into something deeper than political borders.”
—From Flight Attendants, written on my blog
Over the past twenty years, research has emerged to define the seemingly undefinable. “Third Culture Kids” (TCKs) is a term coined by Ruth Hill Useem in the 1950’s to describe children who have parents from one culture/country and that have grown up in another (Useem 1993). This lifestyle, often accompanied by constant travel, creates a whole new “third culture” in the child. And because a TCK upbringing effects a child’s whole lifetime, adults that grew up like this are simply referred to as Adult TCKs, or ATCKs (Pollock, 1999). Through the rapid pace of globalization of this decade, more and more families are being spread across the globe and constantly creating these “global citizens,” as author Pico Iyer describes it (Iyer, 2001).
There are generally three categories of TCKs: those whose parents are international military members, business workers, governmental workers, or missionaries (Pollock, 1999). In this paper the author will be focusing on Missionary Kid (MK) research for the reason that MKs are usually the most integrated into the new country (Hervey, 2009). This greater integration causes more dilemmas, especially when returning to their “home” or passport country (Eakin, 1998; Kidd & Lankenau).
There are numerous negative effects. Loss of belonging, cultural confusion, and constant separation generally causes unresolved grief in a TCK (Pollock). But with the advent of the Internet, TCK researchers began to commend the positive effects of this worldwide communication. Researchers have commented on the value of Internet use in keeping in touch with relationships across continents, because it often lessened grief from constant separation.
The problem is that this research was conducted in the 1990s, at a time when simple email was beginning to transform the way society viewed distant relationships. Now, with technology such as Facebook, Skype and other internet communications devices, the world is remarkably connected. The author thus hypothesizes that this has had impact on a TCK and MK’s sense of belonging and alleviates the common feelings of isolation and displacement.
