Guest Post by Yuliya, Author of Tiny Expats

Yuliya shares her thoughts about her kids’ national identity and finding their roots in raising her kids in the expat world – a topic I find to be intriguingly interesting from the eyes of an expat with multi-cultural and multi-lingual background. Don’t forget to visit her blog for a peek into her world. 

I’d like to thank Ann, for hosting me as a guest blogger. I can relate to what she writes on her blog – we also have kids, who are growing up away from their home country. Ann asked me to write about our kids’ sense of identity – where are their roots? What would they call home and how would they describe themselves?

Let’s start by saying that even I have no idea, which country should be called ‘the’ home country for them. Their mom is Ukrainian (with some family members in Russia), their dad is Russian (with some family members in Ukraine), the older one was born in Germany and then lived for approximately similar amounts of time in China, Russia and CZ. The younger one now lived for almost the same time in CZ as in Russia, where she was born. They have grandparents in Russia and China. And, to make the already complicated situation even more fun, officially they are British (their dad lived in UK for a very long time). When asked ‘where do you come from?’, even I have a problem of forming a a short answer.

I am Ukrainian, that is true, but I left Ukraine, when I was 17, so, basically, I lived for all my adult years else where. My husband has a bit of a trouble identifying himself as well – he is Russian, but he lived in UK since he was 12. What if somebody asks my girls the same question? Where do they come from?

My main hope is that the world is changing rapidly, it is becoming smaller and closer with every passing year. You can travel faster to any part of the world, you can talk to your loved ones for free any minute (my girls see their grandmas every day on Skype or FaceTime), keeping up with friends is easy via social networks. It is not that daunting to move to another country and more people decide to become expats, hence, there’re more TCKs around to give company to my kids 🙂

During my student years in London, I met lots of students who were of a mixed background, with parents coming from two different countries and them living in the third one. Usually, when asked where they are from, they would tell you the nationalities of their parents and name their current home base. Just like that – why try to come up with a one word name for yourself, if you can give a fuller, yet still pretty short, description? Why do you have to choose one nationality or one country instead of being proud of all the sides of your multinational and multicultural background? For example, my sister, when asked about her nationality, would tell you that she’s Ukrainian with a touch of Gypsy, Armenian and Turkish (and it doesn’t matter to her that all those family members lived several generations before) 🙂

I would definitely tell my kids all about their ancestors. They should know their roots to have a better understanding of who they are and where they came from. And when they get asked about their national identity, they would not feel under pressure to fit into some socially accepted labels.

They are a great combination of different backgrounds, they can name several countries as their home and they should be proud of being who they are. I’m sure there would be difficulties along the way, probably around teenage time as well, so I’m planning to read up more on TCK related issues. In any case, I hope that my tiny expats would grow into self-confident citizens of the world.

 

Side note from Ann:

To all bloggers out there, I’m extending an open invitation for you to send me your guest postings and I’ll be really happy to put up your posts on my blog. All you have to do is just drop me a line here.