Clergy Wellbeing Down Under

Episode 3: The Hidden Challenges and Strengths of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) with Tanya Crossman

Valerie Ling Season 2 Episode 3

Discover the hidden challenges and strengths of Third Culture Kids (TCKs), who grow up outside of their passport country, and how their unique experiences shapes their lives in unexpected ways. In this thought-provoking episode, we sit down with Tanya Crossman, a leading expert on third culture kids (TCKs), who shares her own transformative experiences and groundbreaking research. From her insightful books "Thongs or Flip-Flops" and "Misunderstood" to her pivotal role at TCK Training, Tanya brings a wealth of knowledge and personal stories that will resonate deeply with anyone interested in the complexities of growing up across cultures.

Our conversation uncovers the long-term psychological impacts of being a TCK, spotlighting how parental mental health and resource limitations can strain the parent-child bond. We delve into the prolonged identity issues many TCKs face, often recognizing emotional gaps only in their 30s and 40s.

Amidst these challenges, there is hope and resilience. Explore the intricate dynamics of TCKs' emotional worlds, from early feelings of uncertainty to the unique ways they navigate friendships in constantly changing environments. We emphasize the critical importance of positive childhood experiences and community support, drawing from our own parenting insights to offer practical tools for fostering emotional and physical safety. This episode is a treasure trove of valuable advice for TCK families, underscoring the importance of resilience and integration to help children thrive despite the obstacles they face.

For more on Tanya's work and the wealth of research, resources and upcoming training head over here.

For resources and training options in parenting TCKs head over here

To download our full survey report head over here

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Podcast Disclaimer:

Please be aware that the opinions and viewpoints shared on this podcast are personal to me and my guests, and do not represent the stance of any institution. This podcast aims to present findings for open discussion and dialogue, inviting listeners to engage critically and draw their own conclusions. While the content serves informational purposes, it is not a substitute for professional advice. Thank you for joining me on this journey of exploration and conversation!

Valerie Ling:

Hey there, I'm Valerie Ling and I'm a clinical psychologist and I will be your host for Season 2's episodes, titled the Ministry Kids' Well-Being Down Under episode. We asked 100 ministry kids how they are doing. These are Australian kids who are either serving with their family locally or serving abroad on the field. If you haven't already done so, I recommend catching up on episode one, where I share the main findings from our survey. Every episode, I'll talk to someone whom I hope will be able to help us understand and unpack what the kids told us. I hope you enjoy it. Let's do it. I'm so pleased to be joined with a new friend, really Tanya Crossman. As we talk about mainly, I wanted to tap Tanya's expertise with regards to third culture kids and kids on the field. So welcome to you, tanya.

Tanya Crossman:

Thank you so much for having me.

Valerie Ling:

I'm excited to be here now, when we talk about research, I'm just in awe of your research, um. I mean, we're talking about thousands, we're talking it's spanning over several years. It's so rich, um. I tried to read all of the white papers that you've put out, um, and it's so exciting that you have that much knowledge, and I'll be sure to be putting links into the episode as well. But thank you so much for the work that you've done. Tell us a little bit about you and what started this.

Tanya Crossman:

Wow, what started this? I mean, I was a TCK um with a corporate family, like my dad's job moved us around, but I didn't know that word, didn't know that terminology. And it wasn't until I was working as a youth worker with an international church in China. Um, a friend had become a youth pastor, was like, hey, you should come to youth group. And I'm'm like, no, I'm busy, I'm doing my own thing. And then I finally went and was like, oh, I feel so at home here.

Tanya Crossman:

And it took two years for me to realize that I was also a TCK. And it was because I was reading the TCK Bible, the Pollock and Van Wreck book, and I got to the bit on repatriation and went, oh, that's what happened to me, right. And went, oh, that's what happened to me, right. And so a lot of my work is motivated by that penny drop moment or when you realise that other people have been through what you've been through, that there is vocabulary, there is research and there is stuff already out there that you don't know about. Whether you're a parent, you're an adult TCK, you're a TCK yourself. You're a cross-cultural kid with a different kind of background, being able to provide people with information so they feel less alone and less lost on this journey to finding out who we are and how to move forward in life.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah, I can relate to that. So my brothers and I also, we were moved internationally because of my dad's work. We weren't in ministry or anything like that, but it was sitting at a missions member care conference, going. Oh, that's why my brothers and I experienced this. You know, I used to have a because my husband and I we've moved a lot as well um, and we'd have this constant argument he'd want to pack everything. You know like, make sure that the new place and I've learned to only pack my room and what can fit in these number of boxes, right, and I could never understand it until I realized, oh, because that's how I've had to cope with loss, if I can contain it. And I was always told, right, you've only got this many boxes to take with you.

Valerie Ling:

So you've written two books. I've just read the most recent one, thongs or Flip-Flops, australian Kids Overseas and what Comes Next. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed that, as well as misunderstood the impact of growing up overseas in the 21st century. Yes, with regards to the work that you do, the research I love how you talk about cautions and hopes. Right, because one can be tempted, when we look at the research and we're about to get into what you've discovered to go oh my gosh, this sounds like totally bad news. It's a go, yeah. So I'm really looking forward to unpacking what we found. With regards to what you found cautions and hopes first, I'd love to understand adverse childhood experiences. What is this all about?

Tanya Crossman:

So I work at TCK Training. I'm the Director of Research and International Education. Our founder and CEO, lauren Wells, is a missionary kid herself, and when she went and started doing her studies, her real field of interest was prevention science. So this is a whole field around. What are the things that we can do as children are growing up to prevent issues in adulthood? So what are the interventions we can put in place?

Tanya Crossman:

And so adverse childhood experiences is a field of study that dates back to the 90s, and there have been studies done ever since. Dr Felitti and his team worked out that there are these 10 types of adverse experiences during childhood that can predict high risk for negative impacts in adulthood. So mental health, physical health, lifestyle issues, behavioural things, all kinds of stuff. The risks go way up when you have these four or more of these 10 adverse childhood experience during childhood. So half of them are child maltreatment, so that's abuse or neglect directed at the child, and the other half are what's called household dysfunction, so these are things happening in the home in which the child lives that provides a less stable environment. So the parents living with the child, the adults living in the home with the child, are having issues with things like substance abuse, violence, incarceration, things like that that are contributing to that child's living environment, and so when we look at what you found and we're talking about thousands- you've really done some robust research spanning over how many years now, tanya?

Tanya Crossman:

So our first study was done in 2021. We had 1904 adult tck's participate in that study. We just finished our second study. We had 1643 adult tck's participate in this study. I just finished calculating the a scores for that, so the data will be coming out in the next few months on this one. But from my first look at this data, like literally in the last couple of days, the numbers are looking pretty similar, are?

Valerie Ling:

they.

Tanya Crossman:

This batch to the last batch, which is fantastic. That's what we want to see. We want to see that it's consistent data across these two very different studies and this one we were asking about nationality. So we have 92 nationalities represented in this latest batch of data.

Valerie Ling:

So, in a nutshell, with regards to adverse childhood experiences, how do the kids in mission stack up with this? Where are they?

Tanya Crossman:

So worldwide we were looking at studies that use the exact same questions with the exact same question framing. The largest study ever done was in the US with 17,000 participants and from that study 12.5% of the people had a high-risk ACE score. In studies that we looked at across the world, so we had England, wales, ethiopia, philippines, nigeria, australia the percentage was around 8 to 13, depending on the country. So it was always around that general. About 10%, depending on the country, had a high-risk A score In our study and it's now in both studies the first one we had an average of 21% of tck's had a high risk a score, 17 of the missionary kids, about 24, 25 of the non-missionary kids, and it's looking about the same with this one, about 17 of missionary kids, about 26 of non-missionary kids having a high risk a score. So four or more out of those 10 adverse childhood experiences being present in their life before the age of 18.

Valerie Ling:

And I think you've also got some data around what the actual outcomes therefore are on their mental health. What do we know about that, when you know the kids may have been exposed to these childhood experiences? But then what happens as we travel along and they get older and they're adults?

Tanya Crossman:

Well, that's what we're doing right now is we've got some really robust data on mental and physical health conditions, um that are mirroring data that's been collected in non-tck populations, so geographically stable populations. So over the next few months we're going to be able to analyze that and get some much clearer picture. What we've already seen as I'm starting to unpack this is high levels of anxiety and depression diagnosed in this population. So in the TCKs you had four or more ACEs. We're looking at half of that group being diagnosed with anxiety, half of that group being diagnosed with depression, and we'll have a lot more data coming out in the next few months.

Valerie Ling:

So there are some cautions to this. What are the top cautions that have come out of your research, for you know the faith communities, parents and missions agencies to know about? Tanya?

Tanya Crossman:

There were two main things connected with these high-risk ACE scores.

Tanya Crossman:

One was high mobility when young people were moving house or moving location significantly frequently so we're talking 10 or more times before the age of 18, they were much more likely to have a high-risk A-score of 18, they were much more likely to have a high-risk age score.

Tanya Crossman:

The other thing we saw was that the rate of a parent with mental depression or mental illness was extremely high.

Tanya Crossman:

When we start looking at the youngest group, it was nearly 50% who had so our Gen Z TCKs nearly 50% said there was an adult living in their home who was depressed or had mental illness and that was super connected to everything else. So one of the biggest cautions we have here is that we need to be looking after the parents, because they're the ones who are impacting the environment that kids are growing up in. A study done by the Truman Group back in 2012 showed that, when you take out all the other factors, people who are working outside their passport country are two and a half times more likely to report those internalizing conditions like anxiety and depression, and that's close to what we saw here about almost exactly twice the number of TCKs said that they had an adult in their home with depression or a mental illness than we saw in any other study worldwide. The highest number worldwide was in the US and that was 19%, and our survey was 39% said that there was an adult in their home with a mental illness.

Valerie Ling:

Well, this is probably one of the motivators that our team wanted to poll the kids right now. It came off the back of me asking, you know, just their parents, mainly the ministry worker you know how they were doing, and discovering that you know up to a third were probably burnt out, probably symptomatic, with some kind of levels of depression, anxiety and stress. You know quite a few of them had seriously considered leaving ministry because of impact on family. And as psychologists I mean, everything that you've just said makes a lot of sense to me, because we know that when parents are suffering with mental illness, if they're under-resourced, if they're not doing well, then it can actually interrupt the parent and child connection as well. So we were curious, I suppose, to find out.

Valerie Ling:

Well, you know, how are the kids doing Now? Our kids? The sample was fairly young, the mean age 12, sort of between 10 to 14. And while 15% had endorsed symptoms or it would have met clinical threshold for depressive, anxiety and stress symptoms, you know we were wondering whether what we're looking at is kids don't know what they don't know yet, um, and really the foundations that they need at this age. Some of the symptoms that and conditions that you're finding probably become more pronounced later on in life. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Tanya Crossman:

Tanya, that's exactly what we've seen anecdotally, and it's part of why we really wanted to get data on the adult TCKs themselves, and one of the things that we're doing is we're looking at what do the numbers look like over the generations? So what's different for those born in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? We're looking at the data for the boomers, the Gen Z and everything in between, because some things have really changed. The question is how much of that is that the situation has changed over time and how much of that is that they are changing how they see things.

Tanya Crossman:

One of the most interesting comments I saw on the most recent study was someone who was older, and they said that their perspective on their childhood has changed as they've grown older and especially as they become a parent, because as a kid they thought they had everything they needed.

Tanya Crossman:

But as they've gotten older, they're starting to re-examine what happened in their childhood and realize actually there's a lot I missed out on, and there's emotional work I'm having to do as I'm older, you know, in my 30s and my 40s, to repair things that were missing then, but they didn't know that until they were much older, and so it's interesting, I think, to look at some of these results by age and what I'd love to do is to be redoing some of this in 10 years, in 20 years and go well.

Tanya Crossman:

So we're starting to see how is a generation aging over time in the way that they view their childhood experiences, because one of the things we've seen is that a lot of the third culture kids take longer to do their processing, to go through their developmental milestones. So often they're still working out their identity and who they are in their early 20s, whereas someone else they might be doing that work in their late teens, and so they're very, I think, for a lot of ministry kids, their sense of identity is very invested in what their parents do For the cross-cultural kids overseas, particularly because if something goes wrong with mum and dad's work, we have to leave the country that is home to us, we lose the visa and everything associated with us, so there is a lot of sense of everything has to be okay and it takes years to get distance from that. And so, yeah, as we move forward in time, like you said, doing this over time is going to be interesting to see if this changes as people get older and have time to process.

Valerie Ling:

So I'd love for you to share with us. You know some of the things that we found. It's almost like, ok, we've got this early group now it's only about 100 of them and 40 of them on the field, but we've got this early group on the field, but we've got this early group. You know cautions and hopes From what you've seen, particularly with. You know issues of mobility and grief and connection with friends, family, parents. What you're seeing now. You know what are some of the things that you can already see in our data that you're thinking oh, you know, maybe in a few years' time this may become a little bit more pronounced.

Tanya Crossman:

The fact that you had about two-thirds saying they had enough time with their family, about two-thirds saying they felt enough connection. That's great, but that still means there's a third who aren't getting those needs met right. And that stacks up with some of the stuff that we've seen where in our surveys of the third culture kids we're looking at nearly half who were not having their emotional needs met. So 44% met the threshold for emotional neglect and emotional abuse, even though those words weren't used. We were using screening questions. The words abuse and neglect aren't used. That they were using screening questions, the words abuse and neglect aren't used. But you know a huge percentage, a third, saying that they didn't feel loved by their parents.

Tanya Crossman:

Yeah, and you know, when you're a child, you just get through.

Tanya Crossman:

You go through. You don't necessarily know that that's not the way it should be right. There can be that sense of I know my parents love me, even if I don't feel it, or I know my parents care about me, even though I'm really craving that time together, and it feels like everyone else is more important than me. And those things become part of the bedrock of how you see yourself and how you relate to other people and it impacts you and your parenting, and what I've seen with a lot of the adults that I have coached and worked with as they grow up, once they have their own children and they realize what it feels like to make the choice to not be around their kids or to choose something else instead of their children, and then it all starts to become real in a different way, both in terms of compassion for their parents of how difficult it was to make the choices they made, but also sometimes the other way around of how could they have made that choice when I was their child.

Valerie Ling:

And so when you fast forward 10 or 20 years, some of these children are going to have to reprocess what this looks like it's really interesting, tanya, because I think it's only when we looked at the open-ended questions, the comments, that we could see that the seeds were there, like there's this need, I think in younger children in general, to, you know, do right by mum and dad.

Valerie Ling:

You know they haven't fully individuated Do right by mum and dad, dad, be part of the team, you know, sort of don't cause any trouble for mom and dad. But then the their emotional seeds of ambivalence in the comments, um, things like it's hard not to have a say or control about where I'm going to go next, um, we saw comments about, you know, I anticipate moving all the time because I don't know when it's going to happen. I don't really know if I can really be friends with the people here because it was so hard to leave the other friends, so I don't know if I can invest right. There was a sense of, in the comments, anxiety as well, what just held in about whether things were going to be pulled out from under them. So you know, when we looked at the comments, I'd have to say the richness of us understanding what the kids were experiencing really came from them, from what they were saying.

Tanya Crossman:

Yeah.

Valerie Ling:

Yeah.

Tanya Crossman:

And I mean I was just talking to someone a couple of days ago about this process of research and like it always has to start with the stories right, so we talked about the books. My first book Misunderstood. I did nearly 300 interviews for that book.

Tanya Crossman:

Wow Just sitting and listening to people's stories and we're talking, you know, know, age 13, 14 through to age 60, um, on top of the, and I had a study with a survey like 750 people, but, yeah, the stories are what give you the space. And with thongs and flip-flops, again, over 200 people in the survey, that 100 that we interviewed, about 80 who are who have their stories in the book, because you can have say, 50% of people felt this way or 80% felt this way, but without the stories you don't get the depth and the power of how this actually hits home when the rubber meets the road.

Tanya Crossman:

What does this actually look like in a person's life? And by this point in my life, I have interviewed probably thousands of head culture kids about their stories and about their experiences, and so, for me, every statistic it's not just a statistic, it's people. I might not know all of the 1,600 people in this survey and the 1,900 people in the last survey, but I know 1,900 TCKs and I know where they fall in those statistics and I'm seeing faces when I talk about this stuff. The stories really matter.

Valerie Ling:

Absolutely. So you know we've got the cautions, we know that high mobility, plus parents who are struggling, plus kids who are maybe not being followed up or you know, sort of watched while they're on the field, and a range of other things. So there are some cautions there. What are the hopes, tanya? You know what keeps us convicted that putting families in ministry who have kids and sending ministries across the globe who have kids is okay. What are the hopes?

Tanya Crossman:

Well, I started Misunderstood with the hope right, because I do this. The whole team at TCK Training just does this because we actually do believe it's worth it. With Misunderstood, I gave the 750 people I surveyed here's a whole list of different adjectives. Tell me which ones you resonate with for your childhood experience. And, across the board, those high, grateful, thankful, wouldn't take it back if I could was super high, right like 90, I think it was 92, 98 saying I wouldn't take this back if I could. Yeah, even though there was still a significant percentage who had felt misunderstood, had felt some level of resentment, had had difficult experiences, they were integrating that experience and and feeling also thankful to be a TCK, grateful for that experience.

Tanya Crossman:

And I think we have to acknowledge that hard doesn't equal bad. Yeah, we can go through hard things and it not be the end of the world. In fact, the research around resilience makes it clear that resilience is only created when we go through hard things, but we have to have supportive adults alongside us when we do that. So if we go through these hard things that we're talking about, these cautions, and children are not getting adequate parental support, then this leads to emotional fragility and that's why making sure parents are really well-equipped is so important. Right, because if parents aren't well-equipped they don't have the emotional bandwidth to meet their kids' emotional needs and to walk with them through these hard things. But when kids go through hard things with appropriate supportive adult you know supervision and help to go through things. It leads to resilience because they learn I can go through hard things and the next time I meet something hard I can remember about these other things I went through and I'm going to be fine this time. And it actually makes them stronger overall. And so even the hard things don't have to be the end of the story.

Tanya Crossman:

What the end of the story is is if families aren't supported to go through these hard things together. Why we do what we do is because we want to provide that preventive care and that support to families so that when these speed bumps come up and we face these bumpy roads, we know how to go through it, because then we can get all the great things out of international life. Right, there's so many benefits the the in additional worldview that we get and the open-mindedness um, again, in this new survey that's just come out, we had adult tck's self-identifying what strengths they believe they have and it's. There's some incredible stuff there 97, I think it was. We're saying.

Tanya Crossman:

I can see both the good and the hard things. There's a lot of integration going on and so, yeah, I I think it's very clear that the adult tck's themselves are doing the work to to pull these threads together and we want to make sure that we support them to, yeah, to to get all those wonderful things, to be resilient and to integrate those experiences. I think we certainly saw that as well in the in our survey of the kids, just talking about resilient and to integrate those experiences.

Valerie Ling:

I think we certainly saw that as well in our survey of the kids. Just talking about the benefits, the privileges, you know they know that they get lots of discounts and you know the opportunity to travel for cross-cultural kids as well. You know they were. I actually thought they were really balanced, tanya. I mean, if you look at the age of the kids, there's a real honesty in the balance of saying, actually we think that our life is pretty interesting and you know, not a lot of kids get these sorts of opportunities and then at the same time they express their desires.

Valerie Ling:

Now the open-ended questions. We couldn't have influenced them very much because we basically just asked them openly what would make you happy, and an awful lot of it came down to more time with parents, the ability to say hard things like how I really feel, without being judged. Now I have to say that I'm a parent of ministry kids who we dragged across the world and across Australia, sydney, and it's hard for me to, you know, do a piece of survey. That then causes parents to feel like we're blaming them, because I can tell you that from this survey, my own adult children are reassessing their childhood like in speed. One of them actually said, I've been reflecting on your parenting.

Valerie Ling:

That's scary at all Hearing the kids talk. Right, they're now re-scripting and going. Oh yeah, that's how I felt. Oh, that happened to me as well. Oh yeah, I didn't know that that was a great parenting moment for you guys. And I'd hate for parents to feel like we're saying, you know, you guys are failing the kids or you, you know you you're really stuffing things up. I mean, what's the? What's the perspective? Because we've got now these kids with parents who are doing the parenting now in real time. Right, they've, we've got the opportunity, I guess, to go. We're on your side, don't give up. What's the perspective for these parents?

Tanya Crossman:

I mean, I had been working with TCKs for about 10 years when Misunderstood came out. But actually the motivation for the book was the parents. It was the parents I'd started coming alongside and walking with and realizing how many parents feel stressed and anxious and guilty or even shame over not knowing what's happening with their parenting journey. Because when you set out and you do this, especially ministry families and cross-cultural families and and missionary families often you don't have a model of what comes next and even if you have a history of ministry or missionaries in your family, they weren't parenting through this whole like internet age, like it's just. You don't have a picture of what to do and how it's going to work out and there is a lot of stress around that for parents. And so being able to say to parents hey, parents, hey, 90 of people who grew up this way are thankful they grew up this way. Yeah, just to give that blanket of it's going to be okay, I think is really important and also just say here are some tools.

Tanya Crossman:

You're not in this alone. Other people have have done the work to give you some ideas of how to, how to do this, and one of the biggest tools we come alongside with is the positive childhood experiences right.

Tanya Crossman:

So we talked about research on adverse childhood experiences. There are also the positive childhood experiences, the research that goes okay. So what about people who have these hard things happen but thrive? Right, we know their risk is higher, but what does it look like to have a hard childhood and still thrive? And Dr Christina Bethel's team looked at that specific subset of people and came up with this list of eight different positive childhood experiences and said when these are in place, kids still thrive. And the majority of those positive childhood experiences require a community. And so being able to say to parents you cannot do this on your own, you're not supposed to do this on your own, you need your community. And so being able to say to parents you cannot do this on your own, you're not supposed to do this on your own, you need your community. And this is why we all need each other.

Valerie Ling:

I'll be sure to be putting the links because I know your organization does a lot of training and there's a lot of information. But what are some of these positive childhood experiences?

Tanya Crossman:

So the first three happen at home, and this is about the parent-child bond. So kids need to feel emotionally safe, that they're seen, they're heard, they can talk about hard feelings. They need to feel physically safe. So they need to feel safe in their home. This can be a bit tricky when you're moving locations, especially countries, because the child's perception of safety and the parent's perception of safety can be very different. Right? So you grow up in a country where there's walls and guards and bars across windows. The parent feels unsafe in that environment, but the child feels safe in that environment. And so then you move to australia where there's no fences and no guards and no chains, and the parents are like, phew, I can finally feel safe and the kid is feeling unsafe, right? So having conversations about what safety?

Tanya Crossman:

is becomes really important. Yeah, so it's not about parents doing something wrong. It's about the fact that they're just growing up differently. And the third one, at home, is feeling that their family has their back right, that their family is a unit that's going to look out for each other and going to protect each other and going to be on each other's side. So that's three.

Tanya Crossman:

The other five are all about community. So having supportive friends, feeling a sense of belonging in high school, belonging to a supportive multi-generational community that they feel part of as themselves, not just somebody's kid. Having two non-parent adults who take a genuine interest in them so that could be an auntie, that could be a teacher, that could be someone at church, and finally, enjoying participating in community traditions, and so when you lay it out like that, these are just ordinary things that a lot of us we just want to have that be part of our lives. It's not something out there and crazy, and so sometimes this can be extremely comforting that oh wait, wait, these things that we do are the things that make our kids safer and protect them.

Valerie Ling:

Yes, they do. You certainly need resourced parents, parents who feel like they've got the energy and the confidence to do that. So I'd love to wrap up this section and ask you you know, if there is a TCK listening to us right now what encouragement would you want to leave with them?

Tanya Crossman:

You aren't alone. Whatever you have gone through the good things and the hard things other people have tread this road ahead of you and there are so many resources out there where you can read other people's stories and you can see what this journey can look like and process through that for yourself. You can unsack all of those experiences and chart.

Valerie Ling:

This is the end of part one. In part two, Tanya talks to me about neurodivergence and our kids in ministry. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you liked what you heard and you think others should hear it too, don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Catch you later.

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