• Your parents are from two different countries? Yes / No
• As a child, you grew up in one or more foreign countries? Yes / No
• As a teenager, you grew up in one or more foreign countries? Yes / No
• You attended a bilingual or international school? Yes / No
• You attended college/university in a foreign country? Yes / No
Example
Carlos Ghosn was born in Brazil in a family hailing from Lebanon. When he was six his mother moved back to Beyrouth, where he attended Jesuit primary and high school. He graduated from Polytechnique and Ecole des Mines, two reputed higher education establishments in France. After a professional debut in France he moved to Brazil then to the United States. He is famous for having masterfully re-structured the Japanese automobile firm Nissan and is currently CEO of the French group Renault.
Your language skills
• Your mother tongue is not the language of the country you grew up in? Yes / No
• Your parents do not share the same mother tongue? Yes / No
• You are bilingual, trilingual or fluent in several languages? Yes / No
Example: Carlos Ghosn speaks five languages - Arabic, French, English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Your multicultural assets
• You are open to changes, comfortable in culturally ambiguous situations? Yes / No
• You expect people from different cultures/countries to show different behaviors,
have different attitudes and values? Yes / No
• You are attuned to the cultural characteristics of people you meet? Yes / No
A survey of American subjects shows that "third culture children" are four times as likely as others to earn a Bachelor’s degree. They tend to work in highly paid positions. 90% report feeling they understand other cultures/peoples better than the average American.
On the negative side
• At times you have felt out of sync with your peers? Yes / No
• You sometimes experience a sense of rootlessness? Yes / No
• You miss the friends you had to say goodbye to, the places that felt like home? Yes / No
90% of "third culture children" feel out of sync with their peers.
Your core identity: global nomad
• Asked where you are from, you tend to quote a long list of places.
• You feel especially at ease with people who have a multicultural life-history.
• You do not fully identify with the culture of your parents’ country or that of the countries you lived in.
Rather, you claim to belong to all of them and feel you are culturally unique.
If you replied "yes" to most of the above items, you are definitely a "third culture child," the "primary" culture being that of your parents while the "secondary" is that of the countries you grew up in. Your own is a product of those various influences and of the way you have balanced them. The phrase "third culture child" was coined in the sixties by the American sociologist Ruth Hill Useem.
Parents of Third Culture children
While their first-hand multicultural experiences are an incredible asset for their future professional life and also enrich their personal life, there remains the necessity to process them in a positive manner. You can foster the development of their own personal identity by fully acknowledging their difference as third culture children, with a unique mix of cultural heritage and a specific mix of cultural experiences which does not necessarily mirror your own as a child or teenager, nor resemble what their peers experience back in your “passport country.” 
