Four Ways to Leverage Multi-Cultural Experiences to Raise Successful Kids

In an increasingly globalized world, there are several ways to use multi-cultural experiences to help your children get a leg up as they move toward adulthood and future careers. Here are four of them.

None are easy, but the first may be the most difficult.

1. Be an Immigrant to the US

Sociologists at Johns Hopkins University, Lingxin Hao and Han S. Woo, found that children of immigrants in America achieve more academically and have better transitions into adulthood than their peers with native-born parents. The advantage is highest for foreign-born children whose parents move to the States, followed closely by American-born children of immigrants. Hao and Woo’s findings appear in the September/October 2012 issue of Child Development (“Distinct Trajectories in the Transition to Adulthood: Are Children of Immigrants Advantaged?“)

Explaining the difference,

Hao suggests that there is a greater sense of community among immigrants out of necessity—newcomers often need a lot of assistance when they first arrive in the United States. But Hao, who is from China, thinks there is also a great deal of inspiration to be found among the immigrant community: Parents might be working multiple low-level jobs and encourage their children to seek a better life for themselves. The success stories of immigrants who have “made it” are also held up as role models for immigrant children, something other native-born groups might be lacking, Hao said.

(“Children of Immigrants Are Coming Out Ahead of Their Peers, U.S. Study Finds,” ScienceDaily, September 13, 2012)

2. Don’t be a tiger parent

This one might go under the category of cultural lessons on what not to do.

Regardless of what Amy Chua writes in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, “Chinese-style” tiger parenting is not the best model for raising children. This is according to researchers Su Yeong Kim, Yijie Wang, Diana Orozco-Lapray, Yishan Shen, and Mohammed Murtuza. They compared the developmental outcomes of children from 444 Chinese-American families in northern California, using eight parenting dimensions—”parental warmth,” “democratic parenting,” “parental monitoring,” “inductive reasoning,” “parental hostility,” “psychological control,” “punitive parenting,” and “shaming”—to categorize four parenting styles. In order, from the style that produces the best developmental outcomes to the least, they are “supporting,” “easygoing,” “tiger,” and “harsh.”

From the abstract of “Does ‘Tiger parenting’ Exist? Parenting Profiles of Chinese Americans and Adolescent Developmental Outcomes” (published in Asian American Journal of Psychology, March 2013):

Compared with the supportive parenting profile, a tiger parenting profile was associated with lower GPA and educational attainment, as well as less of a sense of family obligation; it was also associated with more academic pressure, more depressive symptoms, and a greater sense of alienation. The current study suggests that, contrary to the common perception, tiger parenting is not the most typical parenting profile in Chinese American families, nor does it lead to optimal adjustment among Chinese American adolescents.

(Nate Kornell “Does Tiger Parenting Work?” Psychology Today, December 14, 2012)

3. Make sure your children learn a foreign language

Bronwyn Fryer, a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review, trumpets the need for “soft skills,” things like “emotional intelligence,” “listening,” and “authenticity,” for global leaders. But, he writes, the top soft skill for executives in global organizations is “sensitivity to culture,” also known as “cultural empathy.” According to Frye,

True cultural empathy springs from personality, early nurturing, curiosity, and appreciation of diversity. But, very importantly, it also springs from deep exposure to more than one language. And this is where American executives fall short.

Learning another language, he says, not only helps in communication, but opens up one’s thinking:

As anyone who has ever learned to speak a foreign language fluently notices how each language shifts one’s consciousness. One day, you wake up and you realize you have been dreaming in the new language. Eventually you realize you are thinking in that language. And when you shift back and forth between, say, your native tongue and the acquired language, you feel like you are driving a car with a stick-shift; you are more involved and engaged in the experience. You take in more; you hear more. And you literally feel different; you are “more than yourself.”

(Bronwyn Fryer, “Why America Lacks Global Leaders,” Harvard Business Review, August 23, 2012)

4. Encourage your children to add overseas work experience to their educations

This one comes a little later in their lives, but they’re always your kids, right?

In 2010, Susan Adams, of Forbes, gathered the views of several hiring experts on the value of work experience overseas. She writes that foreign postings, including the Peace Corps, internships, and other types of jobs, give an advantage to people looking for work. One of the reasons is that living and working overseas exposes people to differing leadership styles.

And some who move overseas find opportunities for long-term employment there. Adams talked with Mary Anne Walsh, a global-leaders coach based in New York, and learned that Walsh’s clients “who moved overseas shortly after college and graduate school . . . advanced much more quickly than if they had tried to climb the career ladder in the U.S.”

Others had this to say:

Dan Black, Americas director of recruiting for Ernst & Young—

We definitely see overseas experience as an advantage. Our clients are demanding more of us these days. They want diversity of thought and diversity of values, and many of our clients are multinationals.

Gary Baker, U.S. global mobility leader for PricewaterhouseCoopers—

[Being part of a minority group in another country] gives you a greater respect for other cultures, and you learn to be better at managing teams that are diverse.

Not only does working overseas build character, writes Adams, but being successful in a foreign country also increases one’s confidence. “If you can make your way in Mexico City, Abuja or Sao Paulo, then traditional U.S. organizational issues will be a snap for you.”

(Susan Adams, “How a Job Abroad Can Give Your Career a Big Boost,” Forbes, November 4, 2010)

[photo: “Awaiting Riders,” by dolanh, used under a Creative Commons license]

Two Great Resources for All Things Member Care and Missions

Missionary Member Care
I recently found out about an ebook by Ronald L. Koteskey, Missionary Member Care: An Introduction. Koteskey and his wife, Bonnie, have served in member care for over 16 years and share this and other “resources for missions and mental health” at the website Missionary Care.

There is a wealth of useful information in Missionary Member Care‘s 169 pages, but the parts that interested me the most were

An overview of the trials faced by the “father of modern missions,” William Carey, and his family. (I’d read about some of what they went through, but hadn’t known the full extent of it.)
The writings of other early missionaries, revealing their struggles and their need for member care.
Numerous books and websites dealing with member care.
Information on a number of member-care organizations.
A list of conferences for member-care givers.

Brigada
And the second great resource? That’s where I heard about Missionary Member Care. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s Brigada, a weekly “web journal offering resources, strategy tips, tools and ‘hacks’ to Great Commission Christians.”

There are a couple ways to read Brigada, edited by Doug Lucas, founder and director of Team Expansion. One is to go to the website, where the newest issues are displayed, as well as a link to the archives, with issues dating back to 1994. The other way is to join thousands of other subscribers by signing up for weekly updates.

Brigada‘s information comes from a myriad of sources, and if you’d like to submit your own items for publication, you can do that, as well.

[photos: “Number One,” by John Ayo, used under a Creative Commons license, and “Copper Number 2,” by Leo Reynolds, used under a Creative Commons license]

Nancy Berns: “Closure Doesn’t Exist,” Let Grief and Joy Be Intertwined

“What have you grieved in the past?” asks Nancy Berns, a sociologist at Drake University. “What might you grieve in the future? And some of you are grieving today. It’s not just the death of loved ones that we grieve. Our life is full of losses.”

These include the losses associated with transitioning between homes and cultures, away from family, friends, and the familiar.

When faced with that grief, we usually look for ways to move on, to find closure. But according to Berns, “Closure doesn’t even exist. It’s a made up concept that we use to talk about loss and grief.” And trying to gain closure “can do more harm than good.”

in her TEDxDesMoines talk below, Berns, author of Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us, says that we shouldn’t box up our pain, close the lid, and walk away to look for a separate place of joy. In a previous post I asked, “Can Grief and Joy Coexist?” Berns is convinced that not only do they exist together, but they are intricately intertwined.

Listen to her explain this relationship and open a box to share stories of people expressing their grief . . . and joy. Hers is a message for those who are grieving and for those know others who are dealing with sorrow. And that pretty much includes us all, doesn’t it?

Knowing that joy and grief can be carried together is so important,” says Berns, “because it’s a long journey without the possibility of joy.”

So the next time that you see someone who’s entering that space of grief—might be a family member, might be a friend, a coworker, just someone you recently met—don’t hand them a box. Don’t tell them to find closure. Meet them where they’re at. And they might be broken and down and beaten up.

Then, kneeling on the stage, she continues:

Meet them where they’re at. And while you’re there, take a moment and look around, ‘cause you might be surprised at the view you have when you’re on your knees. And if you’re the one broken, you might be surprised at how comforting it can be to have someone just meet you where you’re at, not to try and get you to stand before you’re ready, not to try and take away your pain or explain it away. Just to be with you. And when you’re ready, to give you a hand up, to take those steps. . . . You see it’s not about closure. Healing? Yes. But that’s different.

[photo: “Box 5,” by Brenda Clarke, used under a Creative Commons license]

Serving Globally: The Tuggings on Our Souls

I’d like to point you toward two recent thought-provoking articles from Christianity Today. Both appear under CT‘s “This Is Our City” banner.

The first is written by Rachel Pieh Jones, who blogs at Djibouti Jones. It’s titled “You Can’t Buy Your Way to Social Justice,” with the tag, “Why the activism of some fellow Americans scares me.”

At her blog Jones writes,

Today I have an article at Christianity Today and I’m kinda scared about it. [. . .] The article looks at the current trends of using intentional purchases (fair trade coffee, etc) to fight injustice worldwide, from the perspective of someone (me) who has spent more than a decade living overseas, working toward development and human dignity in the Horn of Africa. [. . .] I’m afraid people will be offended or get mad. [. . .] But . . . well . . . there it is. I have a lot to learn, which I hope comes across in the essay and I look forward to learning from you because overwhelmingly, you challenge me to think better, to not be complacent, and you handle my messy process with grace.

From the CT article: “I have a theory about what is partly contributing to the dearth of young Americans willing to spend their lives on behalf of others,” Jones writes. “They think they already are.”

The second article is “Choosing Marriage over the Mission Field,” about “How Tim Kietzman, a successful missionary eye doctor, chose quiet faithfulness despite enormous needs in Pakistan.”

After moving with his family overseas, Kietzman served 10 years as an ophthalmologist in the Pakistani valley of Gilgit. But according to the article, his “boldest act for God may have been coming home from Pakistan to repair his marriage of almost 30 years.”

How he came to make that choice involved re-understanding something Kietzman calls the “Isaac syndrome.” “Missionary kids are the sacrificial child for their parents doing what God wants them to do,” he said. “A lot of times they feel like they’re under the knife . . . like they’re second-class citizens.” Compounded by the sense of missing out on their home culture, the Isaac syndrome can leave missionary kids with spiritual baggage.

The Kietzmans returned to the States when “the Isaac role quietly fell on their marriage,” when it “eventually proved too much.”

Read these articles to have your thoughts challenged on making a difference globally—challenged by people who are not writing about theories, but who are writing about the push and pull and stretch and pressures on their own lives—lived “over there” and “over here.”

(Rachel Pieh Jones, “Why I’m Afraid of American Christians,” Djibouti Jones, May 15, 2013; Rachel Pieh Jones, “You Can’t Buy Your Way to Social Justice,” Christianity Today, May 14, 2013; Anna Broadway, “Choosing Marriage over the Mission Field,” Christianity Today, June 13, 2013)

[photo: “Tug of War,” by toffehoff, used under a Creative Commons license]

Member Care: Learning from Each Other

Blogger Maria Foley, at I Was an Expat Wife, writes that her husband’s employer did a great job of easing her family’s transition to life overseas. In fact, she calls the help they got in their move to Singapore “wonderful.” But the return trip was a different story. When they came back to Canada, she says, “the silence was deafening.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In “What the Missionary Sector Can Teach Us about Handling Re-Entry” (May 6, 2013), Maria applauds the work of the Assemblies of God in meeting the needs of their cross-cultural workers. She tells about her friend, Heather, who is a youth coordinator in the International Society of Missionary Kids‘ reentry program, part of the AG’s efforts to help missionaries and MKs adjust to the comings and goings of their cross-cultural lives. Part of Heather’s motivation to help MKs comes from her own experiences as a child in a missionary family. “I wish I’d been able to go through a program like this. It would have been helpful to have those tools,” she says. “That’s why I think it means so much to me to work with these kids, because I had such a difficult re-entry.” (You can read more from Heather at her blog, Adventures in Transition.)

This is a common sentiment among those who work in member care: wanting to serve current cross-cultural workers and their families by providing the kind of help that wasn’t available when they faced similar difficulties in their own lives.

That’s what happened with Lauren and Jo Ann Helveston, who started The Mission Society‘s pastoral-care department in 2007. When the couple were missionaries in Ghana, they weren’t part of “an agency like The Mission Society,” says Jo Ann. “So debriefing, or even training, was not part of our experience.” Now they debrief missionaries who are back in the States.

Jo Ann’s comments come from The Mission Society’s spring 2013 issue of Unfinished—an edition devoted entirely to member care. The article “What Missionaries Don’t Tell You” describes the issue in this way:

The pages of Unfinished typically tell the stories of what God is doing through our missionaries. This issue, however, is more about what God is doing in them, particularly during those difficult seasons that aren’t typically chronicled in their newsletters or blogs. It’s about how missionaries themselves need to be cared for and ministered to.

Preschooler Lessons in Taiwan

Last week’s post on adoption got me rethinking some of my family’s experiences. Here’s a story we put in a newsletter three years ago. One of our sons is Taiwanese and had been in our Taipei home for a couple years, long enough to become a part of the culture within our walls.

Our youngest son has recently started preschool in the mornings. The main goal is to help him understand and speak more Chinese. After his first day, the teacher told my wife that he was hugging the other children—and they didn’t know how to respond. The teacher said that she explained to them, “It’s OK, he’s a foreigner. They hug a lot at his house.”

As he learns more about himself and the world around him, we have more opportunities to talk with him about “who he is.” While we were out one day last month, he saw a sign showing Chinese chess pieces. He asked why they had letters on them. I told him that they weren’t letters, they were Chinese characters. Seeing an opportunity, I asked him, “Are you Chinese?”

He said, “No.”

“Are you American?”

“No,” again.

“What are you?” I asked.

“I’m normal,” he said.

[photo: “Parachute Fun,” by Chris Pawluk, used under a Creative Commons license]

10 Lessons for Cross-Cultural Conversations from That Mila Kunis Interview

Have you seen the viral video of actress Mila Kunis and BBC Radio 1’s Chris Stark? Kunis was on the interview circuit for Oz the Great and Powerful, in which she plays the witch Theodora, and sat down with Stark for a segment on the Scott Mills show.

Stark told The Daily Beast‘s Kevin Fallon that Mills, as “a bit of a joke,” didn’t let him know he’d be interviewing Kunis until only around half an hour before they were to meet. Sounding somewhat starstruck, Stark begins the interview with “Seriously, I’m petrified” and “I’ve never done this before,” leading to an informal chat on a range of subjects, including his “boys” at the bar, the local football team, and Nando’s chicken. Kunis calls it “the best interview I’ve had today.”

It strikes me that we can learn a lot from these two about how to have a good cross-cultural conversation. So here’s the “interview”—between a Third-Culture Kid who moved from Ukraine to Los Angeles at the age of 7 and a lad from England—followed by 10 lessons that they can teach us:

Be yourself and don’t put on airs. Talking to someone from another culture can be daunting, but if you admit your limitations, you stand a better chance of having a meaningful and heartfelt conversation. Genuine curiosity trumps preparation. Just jump “in the trenches.”
A conversation, where both people talk and learn is much better than an interrogation (where one person simply rattles off a series of questions) or a speech (where one person simply rattles off a series of facts).
Boilerplate questions and answers can give some useful information, but after you get them out of the way (Where are you from? What’s your job/major? What do you miss most from your home?) It’s obvious that the reason this video is popular isn’t because we learn that Kunis “loved working with James Franco.” Actually, the biggest scoop probably is finding out that she used to be a bartender.
Asking questions that build upon what someone just said is much better than working through a list. It shows you’re interested and that you’re paying attention. And it’s “way more fun.”
You may need to listen to the voice inside your head (or off camera) to get you back on track if you start talking too much about yourself, but it’s even better just to listen to the voice across from you.
Showing an interest in someone else’s story is a great way to put that person at ease, so is finding something you have in common, which is probably easier than you might think.
Realize that words may need defining. Football isn’t always football. And a pie isn’t always a pie.
It’s one thing to invite people into talking about your world. It’s even better to invite them to experience it themselves. Too bad Kunis has that silly movie she’s working on in June.
Understand that there are cultures within cultures, and not everyone represents an entire country or continent. I really don’t think that “dropping trou” at wedding parties is common with all people all across the UK (though I’m open to learning otherwise).
Have gifts on hand. Imagine how much it would have impressed Kunis if Stark had been able to pull out a Watford jersey—even a yellow one.

(Kevin Fallon, “Chris Stark, Man behind BBC’s Hilarious Mila Kunis Interview, Speaks,” The Daily Beast, March 5, 2013)

[photo: “A Watford Football Shirt under the Beavers Uniform,” by Steve Bowbrick, used under a Creative Commons license]

These Newsletters Aren’t Sent Either

Ruth E. Van Reken’s honest revelations in Letter’s Never Sent has me thinking about all the missionary newsletters I’ve written and read. Missionaries are a good group for emphasizing the positives and putting a good spin on the negatives. Newsletters just aren’t a safe place to share deep struggles, especially when many of the readers are current or potential donors.

I’m not saying that every newsletter should be filled with pain. I’m not even saying that every missionary has enough pain to fill a newsletter. What I am saying is that if the only things you know about missionaries come from newsletters, presentations, and answer-the-routine-questions conversations, then you don’t know the whole story. And what I am saying is that if you are a missionary who is hurting, you are not alone in what you’re going through.

In fact, if you’re any kind of cross-cultural worker or a Third Culture Kid or a trailing spouse or an expat or a repat or a soldier overseas or a family member left behind, and if, at one time or another, any of the following could serve as a heading for your next newsletter or blog or prayer update . . . believe me, you are not alone.

Nobody cares.
God has been silent for a long time.
This was a mistake.
I’ve changed, and I don’t like who I’ve become.
I feel betrayed.
I’m overwhelmed.
I don’t care anymore.
I think I’m going crazy.
Where is my joy?
I wish I could die.
I feel like a failure.
I’m afraid.
I’m lonely.
I’m angry.
I’m disappointed in myself, and I think God is, too.
I don’t belong.

Let me say it one more time: If this is where you’re at or where you’ve been, You are not alone.

And I hope you’re never, ever left to feel as if you are.

[photo: “Creativity,” by Mark van Laere, used under a Creative Commons license]

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