Third Culture Kids & The Internet
The TCK community on www.instagram.com/_thirdculture/
Maximum PC talks all things TCK & Social Media
Maximum PC: Hi Kelly, thanks for joining us! So, to start out, could you explain a bit about yourself, who you are, what do you do?
Kelly Joeman: Sure! I’m Kelly and I’m a senior manager of audience development for One Animation. I manage the digital platforms for kids’ shows, I run YouTube channels for different brands and I’ve recently moved to Singapore, which has been quite a big transition for me.
MPC: What is a TCK? Can you explain what that is? Is it just another name for an ex-pat, or is it more in-depth than that?
Kelly: So, basically, a third-culture kid is an individual who has grown up amongst different countries or spent a significant part of their developmental years growing up in countries and cultures other than that of their parents’ culture or their passport culture. The term has expanded recently because there has been an increase in social mobility and moving around the world. Of course, that means cultures are coming together and so you get more cultural mixing.
The larger umbrella term now is ‘cross-cultural kids’, and that encompasses groups such as migrants, children of migrants, or expats—you know, multilingual, multiracial, and everything in between. Essentially, third-culture kids are kind of part of that bracket, so the term is quite complex.
I like to visualize it as a sort of Venn Diagram. Basically, you have your first culture, which is sort of your home culture, and then your second culture, which is the host culture—that’s the culture of the place that you have been brought up in. And then the third culture is this more abstract thing,
