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How Beautiful Are The Little Feet, Too!

by Dr. Becky Holton

Great Cities Missions Director of Missionary Care

It is an extraordinary and exciting opportunity to be senders of missionaries!  To help support someone who is answering a call from God is an act of obedience as well (Romans 10:15).  Often those who are dedicating their lives to global sharing of the gospel are family units with children.  So, the children also say their goodbyes, pack their belongings, and as they hold their parents’ hands their beautiful little feet scamper, skip, hop, and run across unknown and confusing countries.  With wide eyes and laughter, which can frequently dissolve to tears, these young hearts deal with loss, grief, and identity confusion, just as their parents do, as they learn to adapt to cultures, people, values, and unique ways of living.

Who are these beautiful “little feet”?  Who are these smaller members of the missionary family and team?  They are commonly referred to as TCKs or Third Culture Kids and defined by Pollack, Van Reken & Pollack in “Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds,” (2017, p. 27) as:

a person who spends a significant part of his or her first eighteen years of life accompanying parent(s) into a country that is different from at least one parent’s passport country(ies) due to a parent’s choice of work or advance training.

The TCK life is a both/and life, bringing challenges as well as benefits.  The purpose of this article is to consider how sending and supporting churches, missions committees, individuals, and other missionary care providers can help, encourage, and support the “little feet” in missionary families, while recognizing both the highs and lows of TCK life.  Why?  Because little feet matter too!  And because a supportive faith community can have a positive and lasting impact on these young, formative lives.

But first let’s clear up any possible misunderstandings about TCKs.  Being a third culture kid is not a bad thing, a better thing, or even a mental health condition.  Observed differences are not “weirdness” or odd behavior.  TCKs are not growing up “wrong” and are not to be the objects of ridicule or shaming.  

TCKs are blessed (and sometimes challenged) with the effects of being part of a family that takes Jesus to other countries and other cultures.  Some of these effects may be occasionally observed differences.  However, other times the differences are unobservable but are an internally experienced incongruence by the TCK.  Whether observable or not, these differences are usually adaptive and culturally appropriate (“Where I live, everyone eats with their hands”) and the result of a spiritual discovery of God within a ministerial, cross-cultural context (“Don’t people always kiss each other at church and have birthday cake and parties when someone is baptized?”). Frequently, TCKs witness situations that are difficult for adults to comprehend, and they may struggle more to understand them because their cognitive abilities are less mature (“At night what happens to all of the hungry people on the sidewalks downtown?”  “Is Jesus angry because I don’t share my dinner with them?”). Sometimes they hear their parents cry at night but recall church send-offs that were joyous, supportive, and exciting.  They may be mesmerized and amazed by a Chick-fil-A automatic trash compacter but laugh about a black mamba snake that slithered across their kitchen floor at home.  Or, what used to be their home.

So how do we love and support these amazing TCKs?  These beautiful “little feet”?  First of all, you go to the source and find out!  You ask TCKs, adult TCKs, and parents of TCKs how we can love better.  Below are practical suggestions from these experts on how church senders and mission groups can love and care better!  Here is what they had to share:

  1. We love care packages! It lets us know you remember us. (But you might want to check with mom and dad first since delivery options are often unreliable and we may never get the long-awaited package. And sometimes our parents may have to pay several times the value of the package because of import taxes.)

  2. At times we would like to be included (via Zoom) in kids’ Bible classes for special events or for an interview about our new country.

  3. We like to play online games with you (like Chess, Minecraft, or other games — but within Mom and Dad’s technology guidelines, of course). We really like staying connected with kids our age.

  4. Before we leave our host country on furlough, it would be nice to ask mom and dad what we are needing. They will have some good ideas. Based on what has been happening in our life, we might need some hangout time, fun times, sleepovers, doctor’s appointments, some parent time, or other things.

  5. It is helpful for us to read kid books in our first language and also in the new language we are learning!

  6. When we are back on furlough, it is really great if we can have a friend or buddy that is interested in our mission country or who has also lived in another culture. They can help us figure out some of the things that have changed in our home culture, things that we are clueless about! And it is really nice if we can stay in contact with this buddy when we go back to the mission field, too.

  7. Please don’t be upset with us if we don’t call our parents’ passport country our “home.” It is not that we don’t like it, even though we may get really confused. It is just that we feel more at home in the country where we have grown up.

  8. We like to answer curiosity questions about our home, our personal interests, our mission, or anything about our life there!

  9. When we come to the States on furlough, would you please make sure we get to spend time together as a family? Mom and Dad work very hard and are always helping others. We would really love to spend time with just them, relaxing and have fun. (By the way, would you ask mom and dad if they are taking time off every week? Sometimes we feel sad that they are so tired.)

  10. Thank you for asking about and helping our family with our educational needs. That’s a big deal for us! Having a good education will help us navigate a lot of things now and later.

  11. When we visit your church on furlough, a lot of us easily get embarrassed. Some of us really don’t like the spotlight and we don’t want you to think we are heroes or anything. But sometimes we like to share our story with other kids, too.

  12. We REALLY need to feel like we belong. Consistent connection really means a lot to us. More than we can explain.

  13. When we moved back to the States, re-entry was really hard. I didn’t know who I was because we weren’t missionaries anymore. Everything was so different here and inside my skin I didn’t feel like I fit, even though I looked like I did. I felt like an immigrant on the inside of me. When other kids come back to the States, I hope you will just love them and give them time to go through all of that adjustment. Again.

  14. Gifts and all the fun times are great! But what we really want — and NEED — is a relationship with you. Personal. Consistent. Loving. Curious.

  15. We are not very good at goodbyes because we have had to say so many. In fact, it is one of the hardest things about being a TCK. But would you hug us anyway, even if we act like we don’t want one? Tell us you love us and will miss us. But would you please tell us that our relationship is not going to go away? Let us be sad sometimes and let us tell you what makes us sad. Mom says that is healthy and that kids grieve, too. Especially, TCKs.

  16. We would like to establish some traditions with you, especially when we are on furlough. Maybe we can always do some of the same things, go to the same places, play similar games, have sleepovers, etc. Then when we are gone we can stay connected and even have technology traditions! Traditions help us feel more stable and like we belong.

  17. We may be TCKs but we are just kids. Plain old kids who are doing the best we can do. We will mess up and be loud and noisy sometimes because, well, we are just kids! Thank you for the extra kindness and grace you give us in those moments.

  18. Thank you for loving and nurturing and caring for our parents. When you help them, it also helps us because then they feel better and can help us better, too.

Aren’t these some great suggestions?  I am so thankful for the young and older TCKs that took the time to help us learn how to love TCKs better.  Although this isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list, it is a wonderful list that can open up compassionate and creative places in our hearts to help us care better.

Oh Lord, we want to thank you for the these precious “little feet.”  We thank you for baby feet born on soil in another land.  We want to thank you for growing little feet, for the tired, and disappointed, and often confused little feet.  We thank you for now large feet who were once little feet in another country.  Thank you for the steps of mom and dad who are guiding and teaching their little ones.  Help us to value these little feet and never forget how important they are, too.  May they never be invisible, unimportant, overlooked, or too expensive in our sending and our caring.  Please protect these little feet, Lord, and help them to be strong and resilient.  For as you say, “Of such is the Kingdom of heaven!”  Because of Jesus, Amen.