Slurping Soup and other confusions

Last week my friend Jenni and I attended a workshop provided by Jack's school on a book called Slurping Soup and other confusions.  One of the writers of the book came to share with us ways of helping your children process and deal with being third culture children.  A third culture child is someone with three crossing cultures: Family culture, Past culture (where they have come from), and Present culture.

 The first thing that we did in the workshop was name out loud some of the issues that our children are facing or have faced in the past in living in a new country.  It was amazing to hear all of the struggles that these families have gone through, but also the blessings that come from it.  Some of the issues people raised were missing friends, food, exclusion from Chinese kids, new friends moving (since people generally stay her for less than five years), photography of your children (I raised this issue), communicating with people back home, traffic, smells, and Identity.  This last one was a big one for a lot of people in the room.  These families are so diverse.  Maybe the mom came from one country, met her husband from another country, and now they have lived in several places with their children.  When their children are asked "Where are you from?", they don't know how to answer that question.

It was a great workshop in helping to talk through some of these topics with your children and to learn how to really listen to what they are struggling with.  They may be acting out with some sort of behavior, but in actuality dealing with something deeper. 

I know for our family, we have dealt with the photography issue.  Some people ask very nicely to take pictures of the kids, others do it without asking and just run up to them.  If we go to one of the sight-seeing big venues here in Beijing sometimes it feels like we are the attraction.  The kids generally do really well, but sometimes they just don't want their picture taken.  Understandably!!  Sometimes they don't want to stand next to someone they don't know and have to smile.  This is something we are currently talking about as a family and figuring out how we want to address it in a respectful way to our children and to the Chinese people.  How we behave is a reflection on our Father, so how we react needs to be respectful and polite, even if we aren't always greeted in the same way.