Teaching Sophie Her Cultural Heritage
It has always been clear to me that my children should feel proud of the cultures they were born into. In Sophie’s case, it’s living in Norway with a French-Salvadorian mother and a Norwegian father.
It has always been clear to me that my children should feel proud of the cultures they were born into. In Sophie’s case, it’s living in Norway with a French-Salvadorian mother and a Norwegian father.
“For me it’s never been a case of ‘choosing a career path,'” Victoria Moore-Jones said. After traveling around the globe for two decades, she found her career as a policy writer in New Zealand’s Parliament.
It is 5 a.m. and I am sitting in a café at Frankfurt International Airport waiting for a flight that will bring me to the United States in a matter of hours. Eight hours! That is how long a healthy person sleeps at night, how long the train ride from Luxembourg to Hamburg takes, how long a typical day at school is. Eight hours and you can be on a different continent with a completely different culture. It’s nothing new: globalization is bringing people closer together, creating more intercultural relationships and complicating the meaning of “home.” Conventionally, “home” is associated with a geographical location. But, what shapes “home” in a world that is more and more connected? What means “home” to someone who has home everywhere? How does a TCK define “home”? The more I thought about this question, the more it drove me nuts. I had touched upon an issue that is omnipresent in the lives of most TCKs – the question about our roots, about what defines us, about where to go next. …
Yes, TCKs may often struggle with identity issues, reverse culture shock, rootlessness, and loss. But there’s much more to the TCK journey than that.