I Had a Call With Ruth Van Reken. My Face Did the Thing: 🥴
For anyone who does not know who that is: Ruth is the co-author of Third Culture Kids, one of the most widely cited books in intercultural psychology. She has spent decades researching what happens to children who grow up between cultures and the adults those children become. She is, in the most literal sense, one of the people who built the language that my work stands on.
She asked me how I market my books.
It is a strategy of not doing marketing the way marketing is usually done. A pricing philosophy built around accessibility rather than margin. Giving readers a world to belong to. Giving people the words they want to ask in their quiet. It makes more sense the longer I talk about it. I am not sure I had enough time.
She took this in with the patience of someone who has seen many things and said something kind.
And then we got to the actual subject of the SIETAR Valencia presentation and the conversation became something else entirely.
I am still processing it.
The framework we are building the presentation around is the same one in Parenting Unpacked: what happens to your identity when the context that made you competent changes faster than you can adapt. Ruth brought the children’s side. I brought the parent’s. The conversation that came out of that combination is the one I am still sitting with.
Here is what I can say before the speech is ready. The subject we are bringing to the room is this: parenting across cultures today is significantly more complex than most frameworks account for. The research is solid. The reality has simply moved faster than it.
I am the example we are using and I think it is a good one. I am Brazilian. I lived in Australia for years. I am now in Switzerland. And if you sat me down and asked which culture I actually belong to, the honest answer is that I am more shaped by Australian culture than Brazilian at this point, which surprises people who expect the answer to be the country on my passport.
But it is more complicated than that too. My best friend is Colombian. Another close friend grew up in Hong Kong. The way they parent has shaped the way I parent. The values they carry, the things they take for granted, the things they question — all of it has moved through our friendship and into the way I think about raising Emma.
This is the new reality of parenting across cultures. You are not simply Brazilian raising a child in Switzerland. You are Brazilian, shaped by Australia, Portugal, and Ireland, living in Switzerland, parenting alongside a Colombian and a Hong Konger, in a country where your daughter will grow up speaking French and possibly German and the language you speak to her at home.
Ruth Van Reken has been thinking about this longer than almost anyone. Sitting in a conversation with her about it for forty minutes was one of those experiences where you finish the call and sit very still for a while.
The full speech will be here when it is ready. For now the question I am leaving open is this: how many cultures are actually inside you, and how many of them are raising your child?
Jessica Gabrielzyk
