Third Culture Kids: negotiating identity, belonging and wellbeing in transnational childhoods

This qualitative study examines how young people of Romanian origin who grew up in transnational families construct and negotiate cultural identity, belonging and wellbeing. Transnational childhood is operationalised as having spent at least five years of childhood or adolescence abroad as a result of family migration. Within this category, the concept of Third Culture Kids (TCKs) is used to interpret how participants integrate several cultural frames. Semi-structured interviews with thirty young people aged 15–25, who had lived in Spain, Italy, Belgium or the United States, were analysed thematically. Participants described partial belonging, feeling at home in several places yet fully rooted in none, and reported identity-related, social and emotional difficulties. Alongside these, intercultural experience emerged as a resource, associated with adaptability, autonomy, perspective-taking and multilingual competence. Support came mainly from family and peers rather than from institutions. The study argues that this identity is integrative rather than fragmented, and that inclusion for mobile learners depends less on language provision alone than on the recognition of multiple belongings, a task that falls to teacher education and intercultural counselling alike.