Third Culture Kids & Parachute Kids: Building Their Resilience

Ever heard of ‘parachute kids’? Roughly defined, they are children who get dropped off in a foreign country—or parachuted in, so to speak—to further their education. The kids are usually middle school or high school aged but sometimes younger. Meanwhile, their parents fly back and stay in their home country.

So what does this have to do with Third Culture Kids?

To find out, join us at the special event hosted by the Families in Global Transition!

I’ll be co-hosting Third Culture Kids & Parachute Kids: Building Their Resilience with the wonderful super-coach, Sundae Bean of the popular Expat Happy Hour podcast.

And we’ll be talking to two experts with fascinating backgrounds themselves:

Dr. Jang Eun Cho is a former parachute kid and one of the few specialists in cross-cultural child and adolescent psychiatry in the United States. She initially had studied to be a surgeon and had already completed half her residency when she made a u-turn and became a psychiatrist.

Jang now runs Cultivate Psychiatry and is the Director of the Consortium at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated MGH Center for Cross Cultural Student Emotional Wellness.

Dr. Timothy Stuart is an adult TCK who is also mixed race. His father is Native American and his mother is Anglo American but he grew up in France and Germany as well as the United States.

Tim did his doctoral research on resilience and trauma at a First Nation reservation school and is now the Head of School at the International Community School of Addis Ababa. He also wrote the book, Children At Promise (you can find it here).


  • Listen to Danau’s interview with Sundae Bean on the Expat Happy Hour here.