helping women connect with their world
There were so many great responses to the last newsletter about change. It would be wonderful to be able to include all of what everyone wrote, but then this email would be way too long!
For this newsletter, we will excerpt from the letters those parts that seem to apply to a large audience. But when you have time or want to see comments on specific aspects of change, go to our website. You’ll find the link at the end of this newsletter. [Read more…]
From Margaret
Several years ago, when our second son went overseas, to England, he planned to settle there. That would have made, one son in Australia and the other in England. How awful! I had some sort of emotional/panic attack. I couldn’t sit still. I had to walk all the time or work. I was exhausted. I had to open the car window all the time, as I “couldn’t breathe.” It really got bad!
I decided to go the Adventist Hospital. God was really in control as He directed me to a wonderful young doctor. He interviewed me and I did my best to explain my “symptoms.” He listened and then he prayed. He said, “I am not going to give you medicine. I think you have a ‘wonderful problem’, a problem that I wish more Chinese mothers had. You care deeply about your children and you did not try and talk them out of going in their chosen directions, like a lot of mothers. But now you are feeling sad, lonely, scared (for them). God sees your heart and He sees the extreme love you have for your boys.
No matter whether we are living cross culturally or in our home culture, we have the responsibility to teach our children about money. Bonnie Nusbaum, a friend of mine, recently wrote how she and her husband taught their two sons financial responsibility. Although they were not living cross culturally, the principles she shared would work anywhere.
We didn’t have a formal plan with a workbook. Most of the training that we gave to our two sons came through role modeling and casual conversation at opportune moments. To quote Dr. James Dobson, “. . . values are caught, not taught.”
I have been thinking about the long term effects of raising our children cross culturally. When they spend more than half their growing up years outside our home culture, they are called “third culture kids (TCKs)”. They blend both good and bad from the cultures they have lived in and come up with a third culture that is their own.
In 1991, Kathlene wrote an article for PW about growing up in France and how that experience molded her life. Iain, an adult PW son, recently wrote about his experiences in West Papua and where he is today. Then I read an article by Matthew Link in Budget Travel, November, 2002, about his “homes.” Like children everywhere they each had a mixture of good and bad experiences growing up. Like all teenagers they had to deal with their identity. But because of their TCK background, they came to some different conclusions than their peers in their home culture.
Survey results do work! Several of you asked about how to help your teens re-enter their home culture. We would like to take a look at a few of the problems teens face as they return to their home culture for higher education and a couple suggestions of ways to help them.
When you see a group of PW kids together, they look like any other active, fun-loving kids. But when you compare them to their peers, they have some significant differences. Because they have lived outside their culture, they have a very different world view than kids back home. They cannot be nonchalant about poverty, world politics, religious persecution or a cholera epidemic. They have been touched in very personal ways with issues like these and have strong opinions. [Read more…]
