괜찮아요

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?