With the rise of remote working more and more parents are travelling and parenting but what does that mean for ‘so called’ TCKs' or Third Country Kids, asks columnist Kerry Hudson?

What does my joyful pink firework of a five year old little boy have in common with Barack Obama, Audrey Hepburn and Freddie Mercury? No, it’s not that they are all fabulous and much replicated on screen-printed throw cushions. The answer is that they are all TCKs, meaning Third Culture Kids. The definition of this is children and adolescents who live some of their formative years somewhere that is neither one of their parents' home countries.

For Freddie Mercury this means being born in Zanzibar, living in India and settling in England. Barack Obama spent periods of his childhood in both Hawaii and Indonesia while Audrey Hepburn was a Belgian by birth, raised in the Netherlands and England.

I think it is clear how our famous TCKs more diverse and open upbringings might have impacted the cultural figures they became, Audrey Hepburn's cosmopolitan artistic sensibility, Barack Obama's charisma and leadership, Freddie Mercury's insistence to not live within the confines that society offered him.

In fact, I had never heard the term Third Culture Kid until very recently but as I have one, currently being raised in Malmö, Sweden, I made it my job to understand exactly what the term means and what the implications might be. It’s also a growing phenomenon in an ever more mobile and globalized world. Third Culture Kids used to be mainly children of parents who worked overseas or in the military but now it is far more common, for freelance parents like us, to........

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