TCK

On this special date which occurs only once every 4 years [hahaa~], I would like to share about this new acronym. Tonight, I learnt this new term called TCK – Third Culture Kids. What’s TCK referring to? It’s actually referring to children who grow up not knowing where home really is.

This is not uncommon. In this advanced world of today, we are literally mobile. We move across geographical boundaries for work, play and study. At times, we may decide to migrate in an attempt to escape from the invisible social bars which locked us in. However, little did we realize that our mobility actually may affect our children drastically. Our children move from one country to another during their growing up years, they made friends here and soon after, they realized they need to part with them… Move to another place, made new friends and before they knew it, it’s time to say goodbye again. They might struggle to keep in contact with old friends, so much so that they rush home after school daily, to go online to their social networking sites…..

They are missing out on the current life, friends and new people.

And actually, I’m also thinking about this other problem that is highly likely to happen. You know how children who constantly change nanny behave? It is precisely because they constantly fall “in and out” of love [some sort of parental love] whenever their parents get them a new nanny/babysister, they will have to go through this sadness and ‘rejection’ and ‘abandon-ness’ and have to start to like/get accustomed to the new nanny/babysister.

Seriously, after a few times, these children developed a new ‘immune system’ — to learn not to give it all their liking or to be accustomed to the new nanny, who will be leaving him/her in a couple of years. This is very real, I do know of people who do not dare to bare their true feelings because they do not want to be committed into a relationship with another person, only to be distant when time is up. Do we really want our children to feel so insecure about making new relationship with one another? It can be pretty difficult to keep up with old relationships at times when you are making new contacts. Despite the advanced technology, if we were to commit ourselves too much to the old relationships and try to maintain it, we might find ourselves unable to commit to a new one.

For instance, how many of you still keep in close contact with your Primary/Elementary school friends? How many of your Secondary/Middle school friends [whom you are not sharing the same tertiary institution with] do you still keep in close contact?

Poor children

I was on my way to my tutee’s place just now when this scene hit me hard — on the bus, there were two primary school boys sitting beside me, nearing one of the bus stops, one of the boys (probably a P4 boy) stood up and was obviously standing very unsteadily. The reason? He was carrying a bagpack, and a A3 size CitiBank bag/carrier (which contains some files and books) AND another A4 size carrier (probably containing art materials).

Gosh, such a tiny body, having to bear with the weight and load… gosh….

And well, the other boy wasn’t any better either. His wallet fell onto the floor as he was struggling to hold on to the few carriers on his hands on top of the huge backpack. Gosh~

Sometimes, I really wonder if we [or our parents] are the “super(wo)men” that others made us out to be. If a Primary School child has to struggle to meet up to expectations, can you imagine how things would be like when (s)he heads on to Secondary and Tertiary education? Recently, I was attending this class which talked about ’suicide’ and ‘depression’, and one of the cases was on this (local) University student who had excel since young, and just first year in uni, he is almost on a nervous breakdown and being unable to cope with the kind of stress that he has to undertake. His parents were getting worried that he’s heading for a nervous breakdown that they sent him for counselling sessions.

Isn’t it a little too pathetic at times? While in our pursue for ‘better future’, we allow ourselves to be the slaves of our expectations, is that a sad reality or what? :p