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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Third Culture Kids

Kids who are growing up in a country and culture foreign to their parents’ upbringing are called third-culture-kids, because they are neither the same as their parents (American in our case) nor are they the same as the kids around them (Ugandan in our case), instead they meld their own tiny “third” culture from the other two.

We see this in a hundred ways almost daily but here is a recent interesting example.  Jack (age 9) has difficulty pronouncing “r”, so we saw a speech therapist in America in January who instructed me on some therapy I could do with him here.  We plugged away at it from February to April then took a break, and yesterday started up again.  As I laid out the cards for our game, he put on his African English accent and challenged the whole concept of speech:  “Mom, there are no “r”s in the way people talk here, and I’m going to live all my life in Africa, so why should you care if I can say “girl” (exaggerated attempt at a good rolling American r) instead of “gallll” (perfect imitation of a Ugandan saying the word)?  “

Having kids who can critically step back from cultural norms and question them . . . An eventual strength, but sometimes a challenge to answer.

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