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"Where are you from, Isabel?" I asked.

"Well, my mother is Spanish and my father is French," Isabel answered in perfect West Coast English.

"What language do you speak at home?"

"I speak Spanish to my mother, French to my father, and English to my little brother."

Isabel is not a refugee or an immigrant living in a ghetto. Her father is a diplomat, and her family lives in a beautiful home in Geneva, Switzerland. Isabel and her brother attend the Ecole Internationale de Génève, the International School of Geneva, a bilingual school with four campuses and a student population of 2,500.

And then there are Mirwais Zekrya, Nandan Sampatkumar, and Omar Odeh, who played on the volleyball team I coached at the International School of Geneva when I worked there. Mirwais's father is from Afghanistan and his mom is from El Salvador, though he has never lived in either country. His English combines elements of British and American sounds to form what seems to be an international English accent. Nandan's father is an Indian Hindu; his mother is Danish and blonde, though she wears the red dot on her forehead. Nandan's English is like Mirwais's, and between the two of them, they speak Afghani, Spanish, Hindi, Danish, and French. Omar has Palestinian parents who met in Kuwait. Omar and his sister were born in Canada, and they speak English (along with Arabic and French) as if they have lived in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles all their lives, though they have never been there.

What do these kids and families have in common? They all speak English, though not necessarily as their mother tongue. Their parents work in multinational businesses, diplomacy, relief and development, journalism, university education, missions, or for the United Nations. The families move frequently from country to country; children average eight moves by the time they turn 18.

Dave Pollock, director of intercultural programs and adjunct professor of intercultural studies at Houghton College, describes Third-Culture Kids, or TCKs, as "individuals who have spent a significant part of their developmental years in a culture other than their parents' or other than the culture that issued their passport." TCKs "develop a sense of belonging to all the cultures of which they've been a part—without having a sense of identity in any. No place is home."

John Gautschi, a 1990 graduate of the American International School of Zurich, worded his angst in a poem published in the alumni newsletter:

I was born in Switzerland
I lived in Spain, Sweden, and Brazil
My dad's Swiss
My mom's American
I'm not Brazilian, Swiss, American, Spanish
I'm eighteen
I'm lost

TCKs, first identified and named by University of Michigan professor emeritus Ruth Useem, differ from their parents in that they grew up as internationals. Most (though not all) of the parents of TCKs are still mono- or bicultural.

"TCKs are cross-culturally mobile children, born into a first culture and raised in one or more additional cultures," wrote Ayla Delin of Istanbul, Turkey, in a letter to Time (March 1, 1993). "Their emergent lifestyle produces a third culture that lacks national or cultural boundaries. TCKs are marginal, mobile in body, soul, and intellect. Their roots lie in uprootedness. They fit in everywhere, nowhere in particular. They are simultaneously insiders and outsiders."

The parents of TCKs hold extraordinary influences in the worlds of business, journalism, politics, and diplomacy. I know of a head of Dow Chemical, a recently retired CEO of Citibank, and an Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations among their ranks. The kids themselves, as members of ambitious, successful, well-educated families, have unusual opportunities to become leaders on national and international scales. Those who are growing up in this environment are world citizens in the truest sense, the next generation of the world's leaders in business, politics, and diplomacy. Already many adults who have grown up as TCKs have positions of significant influence and power. An example is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and an alumnus of international schools. In some ways, TCKs are the first generation of globalized people, both the children and the producers of globalization.

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March 5 2001, Vol. 45, No. 4