HitRed wrote:Found this interesting. Common to have kids living on/off base in the military. Just never heard the term. A Third Culture Kid are kids raised in a culture other than their parents' culture for a significant part of their early development years.
I knew a guy whose parents were British, but he was born in and grew up in Hong Kong until he was 18. When he went to the UK for university, people saw a white guy who spoke English with an English accent and just couldn't understand why he didn't get cultural references to UK things.
'Herp, how can you not have heard of this TV show, you're British?'. Their attitude was always 'oh so you're a British guy who lived in Hong Kong', even though he saw himself as a Hong Konger and had never known anything other than Hong Kong.
It's pretty common for people from well-off families to get sent abroad for secondary school, so they end up with this blend of attitudes and cultural frames of reference/behaviours that reflect both the country they were born in and whichever country they were educated in. Then often, for a mixture of different reasons (e.g. they don't feel as if they are 'from' any one single country, there's no one culture they feel 'at home' in, a lot of people they meet insist on defining them by their nationality/ethnicity and overlook the time they spent in the country where they were schooled etc.) they just end up rejecting any sort of cultural identity and see themselves as being 'from' nowhere in particular.
So, if your parents where from different countries that didn't recognize the spouse, living in another country then you would be a Forth Culture Kid I guess.
And if your spouse was in a country that didn't recongise the kids but the kids were in a different country with you, and that country recognises the kids but the kids don't recognise the country but they do recognise your spouse, then they would be fifth culture.