Launching The Next Generation of Culture Creators:
- rajithar29
- Dec 17, 2025
- 7 min read
What Third Culture Kids Teach Us About Belonging, Identity, and Intercultural Agility
By Marco Blankenburgh & Chris O'Shaughnessy
In today’s world, the experience of growing up between cultures is no longer the exception. It’s becoming a norm. With over 200 million Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and Cross Cultural Kids (CCKs) around the world, these globally mobile children offer profound insights into identity, relationships, and cultural navigation in a complex, interconnected world.
This article is drawn from a wide-ranging podcast conversation between Marco and Chris, who reflected on their own experiences while unpacking the practical tools and metaphors that support Third Culture Kids.
In a recent episode of the KnowledgeWorkx podcast, Marco Blankenburgh sat down again with Chris O’Shaughnessy, a long-time advocate and voice for TCKs globally. Their earlier podcast remains our most listened to episode to date, and this follow-up dives even deeper into the tools, metaphors, and practical approaches that can help families, educators, and leaders create healthy cultural spaces, especially in transient environments.
What Makes a Third Culture Kid?
Chris, a self-described “adult third culture kid,” explains that being a TCK is shaped by two key ingredients:
Growing up with influences from multiple cultures during your developmental years
A higher-than-normal degree of transience — frequent change, movement, or turnover in your environment, even if you're not the one moving. This could include geographic relocation or living in communities like international schools where people regularly come and go.
TCKs experience the tension between where they’re from on paper (passport cultures) and where they’ve lived or been shaped by (experiential cultures). The result is a “third culture” that isn’t just a blend of the others, but something distinct and self-constructed.
The Hallway and Rooms Metaphor
To help explain this unique cultural identity, Chris offers a metaphor:
Imagine your cultural experiences as rooms in a house. Each culture you belong to or interact with is a different room, each with its own rules, language, expectations, and norms. Now imagine a hallway that connects all those rooms. That hallway is your third culture. It’s the space that allows you to move between cultural rooms, often switching languages, behavior, and even values depending on the setting.
This metaphor is helpful because it emphasizes adaptability without assimilation. TCKs often learn to keep these cultural “rooms” distinct because mixing them in the wrong setting can cause friction or confusion. The hallway becomes their main identity, a space that connects rather than replaces.
Why TCKs Intuitively Navigate Culture So Well
TCKs seem to have an almost instinctive ability to “read the room” and to understand what is appropriate or effective in different cultural settings. But why?
Chris offers several reasons:
Multiple cultural feedback loops: Unlike monocultural kids who receive consistent behavioral feedback, TCKs encounter varying reactions to the same behavior across different cultures. This forces a higher level of observation and adaptability.
Social survival instinct: Human beings want to belong. When behaviors get mixed reactions, TCKs instinctively adapt to what is acceptable in each context.
Mirror neuron development: Studies show that observing people in different emotional or physical states activates similar parts of the brain. TCKs, constantly reading social cues in multicultural environments, may develop heightened empathy and observational skills.
Relational agility: TCKs become experts at adjusting their personal space, communication style, or tone based on cultural expectations, even if they can't yet articulate why.
Their constant exposure to diverse norms trains these observational and empathy skills. These experiences create a rich, intuitive skillset. But intuition alone has limits.
The Power of Naming: Processing Intuition Intellectually
One of the most powerful insights from Chris is a quote he credits to a former professor:
“One of the best things you can do in life is to learn to process intellectually what you do intuitively.”
Let’s unpack that.
It means that while intuition is fast, emotional, and often accurate, it lacks clarity. We feel what works, but we can’t always explain why. By giving words and frameworks to intuitive behaviors, we create opportunities to:
Analyze and refine our actions
Communicate our approach to others
Teach these skills to those who haven't experienced them
Make better decisions in unfamiliar situations
This is where Intercultural Intelligence (ICI) comes in — giving TCKs (and the adults who support them) the tools to unpack their experience.
Language, Frameworks, and the Third Cultural Space
So why is language so important?
Language makes the invisible visible. Until we can name something, we’re often not fully aware of it. Chris shares a brilliant example:
In many ancient cultures, the color blue was the last to be named. Languages like Japanese, Māori (New Zealand) and Himba (Namibia) described blue and green using the same word. Without a word for it, people didn’t notice it. Only once you name it do you start seeing it everywhere.
Similarly, when TCKs learn the 12 Dimensions of Culture or the Three Colors of Worldview from the ICI framework, they gain vocabulary to:
Understand their internal diversity (for example, why they may shift between individual accountability and community accountability depending on the setting)
Decode others’ behavior (for example, direct versus indirect communication, planning orientation, honor versus “doing the right thing” mindset)
Answer the "why" behind their own and others’ decisions, speech patterns, and relational choices
Practical example for TCKs: A TCK raised in Japan and the US may realize their indirect communication style in group settings is linked to honor-shame dynamics (Three Colors: Honor), while their American classmates value clarity and accountability (Three Colors: Innocence/Guilt).Without this understanding, they may feel frustrated. With it, they gain clarity, can adapt confidently, and even teach others how to bridge the gap.
Culture Creation in the Family: Rituals, Modeling, and Clarity
One of the podcast's most practical insights is about creating a third cultural space at home. In intercultural families, it’s easy for parents to default to the cultures they grew up in — trying to raise their kids to be “as Dutch” or “as South African” as they are. But the reality is, the lived experience of their children is radically different.
“My Dutch background is part of who I am,” Marco reflected, “but my kids don’t have those 23 years of Dutch experience. Expecting them to be as Dutch as me is unrealistic.”
So how do you intentionally create culture in a multicultural family?
Chris suggests a three-step approach:
Name it: Be clear about the values, traditions, and behaviors you want to preserve. Don’t assume your kids understand them just because they’re part of your nationality.
Model it: Kids mirror what they see. If generosity or hospitality matters to your culture, demonstrate it intentionally.
Ritualize it: Create simple, repeatable traditions that anchor those values. One family makes pancakes every time it rains in the desert — a small but joyful ritual. Another celebrates the new year with friends while camping in the mountains.
Pro tip: Keep rituals flexible. Rigid traditions that require specific foods or customs may break down when you move countries. Focus on the value behind the ritual, not the exact form.
Pitfalls to Avoid
Chris warns that unhelpful expectations often arise from misunderstanding. National identity can become a sticking point for many parents.
“My kid has a German passport, but they’ve lived in Singapore their whole life. What does ‘being German’ really mean for them?”
Parents must avoid projecting their identity needs onto their children. While it's natural to want to pass on your culture, expecting a child to carry your exact cultural identity — without the same lived experience — is unrealistic and can lead to tension.
Common traps include:
Using nationality as a catch-all: Telling kids to “be German” or “be Indian” doesn’t help unless you define what that means in practice.
Projecting experiences: Parents may assume what comforts them will comfort their kids. But kids are often facing different social, emotional, and cultural pressures, especially during transitions like moving countries.
Being reflective, rather than reactive, helps build a home culture that honors both the parent’s values and the child’s lived reality.
From Identity Tension to Identity Integration
The identity journey of a TCK is complex. A question as simple as “Where are you from?” can unravel into five different answers: where they were born, lived the longest, feel most at home, or hold a passport.
This complexity can cause identity strain, leading to defensiveness or oversimplified "us vs. them" thinking. But when framed positively, it offers a path toward identity integration, and the creation of a new, resilient cultural identity.
“The third culture space allows us to step back, reflect, and ask: What kind of culture do we want to create together, in our homes, schools, or workplaces?”
Preparing TCKs for the Future: Tools That Empower
To truly empower TCKs, we need to go beyond celebrating their adaptability. Chris suggests that we intentionally equip them with:
Language and frameworks – Provide clarity and control
Conflict resolution skills – Because avoidance is often their default
Relational self-awareness – Understanding how they and others show respect
The ability to explain the “why” – Articulating their instinctive choices
The ability to transfer their skills – Helping others adapt and thrive
A Final Word
Culture creation doesn’t happen by accident. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or a TCK yourself, the challenge is the same. Create language, rituals, and reflective spaces that bring clarity, connection, and cultural agility.
As Chris O'Shaughnessy says:
“Once you name a behavior, value, or trait you start to notice it everywhere. You expand what you can see, understand, and influence.”
By intentionally building this third cultural space, we empower the next generation to not just navigate culture, but to create it.
Find Chris at www.chris-o.com
Follow Marco and the ICI movement at www.knowledgeworkx.education
Start a conversation with us and invite Chris to speak!
Follow KnowledgeWorkx Education on Facebook and Instagram @knowledgeworkx.education
Learn more about how you transform educational spaces with Cultural Agility at: www.knowledgeworkx.education
Listen to all the podcast episodes of Unlocking Cultural Agility here.
Comments