Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, 3rd Edition

By David C. Pollock, Ruth E. Van Reken, and Michael V. Pollock

Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2017

ISBN: 978-1473657663

480 pages

USD $22.95

Reviewed by Cheryl Doss PhD, adult missionary kid, missionary mother and grandmother, is director of the Institute of World Mission, the missionary training organization of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.

Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds is the “bible” for understanding the positives and negatives of growing up in multiple cultures (cover). As part of a family with four generations of missionary kids (MKs), the first edition of Third Culture Kids (1999) came to me as revelation and reassurance. Our family belonged to a community, a culture, and a tribe that had a name and an identity. Authors David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken had diagnosed our need, detailing and normalizing our experience, with sensitivity and accuracy. Missionary kids were part of the larger Third Culture Kid (TCK) world that included military, diplomatic, and business kids who grew up between multiple cultures because of their parent’s international work. We were understood and now had concepts for the differences and commonalities we had sensed but did not have words to explain.

Yet even as the first edition was being published, Van Reken explains, the increasing cultural complexity of the world, and the stories that quickly surfaced, ensured the necessity of regularly updating the book (xiii). Children of migrants and immigrants, international school students, and minority children, among others, resonated with the descriptions of the lifelong impact of a multicultural childhood. Thus, following the untimely death of David Pollock in 2004, in the second edition of Third Culture Kids (2009) Van Reken added the term Cross-cultural Kids (CCKs) to identify this growing diversity of experience (xv).

With the 2017 publication of the third edition of Third Culture Kids, Michael V. Pollock, David Pollock’s son and an international educator, joins Van Reken to expand and update the previous editions in important ways. In Part 1 the common themes of a multicultural childhood are explored with more stories of nontraditional TCKs (e.g. non-western, multicultural parentage, adoptees, etc.). A discussion of the diversity of CCK experience and how the TCK and CCK worlds intersect highlights the need for more study and research to distinguish both the shared and divergent aspects of the various types of childhoods. Part 2 takes an updated look at the TCK Profile to see how it fits today’s TCKs. Each chapter concludes with suggestions of ways the lessons learned about TCKs might inform the experience of CCKs. Parts 3 and 4 offer additional resources for understanding transition and the care of TCKs. Added or updated chapters include care strategies for parents and organizations, ways adult TCKS can heal the traumas of multiple transitions, and suggestions for the future of this topic.

The clarity of language, riveting stories, conceptual flow, wealth of experience, and something that can only be called “heart” make reading Third Cultures Kids (2017) a journey of joy and growth. For these reasons and more, the third edition is indeed a “bible,” a guide, a road map, for all types of TCKs and CCKs and those who love and care for them. 

For Further Reading

Sand-Hart, Heidi. Home Keeps Moving: A Glimpse into the Extraordinary Life of a “Third Culture Kid”. Hagerstown, MD: McDougal Publishing, 2010.

Bonk, Jonathan J., ed. Family Accountability in Missions: Korean and Western Case Studies. New Haven, CT: OMSC Publications, 2013.