Is open-mindedness a weakness?
An interesting conversation I had by e-mail with one of our members.
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Hi Brice,
thanks for your mail. I try to answer it shortly.
I’m not a real TCK, but a “bi-cultural child”. But from my own experience I can understand very well the common problems of TCKs. And I also agee that open-mindedness is one of the best traits of TCKs. Open-mindedness helps to make your life more interesting, meaningful, to extend your horizon and it gets you to know really different people. But I don’t see it only as an advantage because other people may consider it as a weakness if you’re not able to take a concrete decision pro or contra cause you always can understand both sides of the coin. Maybe in the long term people will see that you’re right but in the short term you may suffer from being misunderstood and understimated.
I also realized that many of my friends like to share their problems with me, and maybe one of the reasons is that they see me as a tolerant person who really can understand their feelings.
So far my short answer to your questions. If you would like to further discuss this or other TCK-related topics to me just write me again. I would really appreciate having someone who can understand my situation through his own experience.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Frank”
February 17th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Indicisiveness…
When I came to England having spent nearly all my life at that time in Africa, I was asked what football team I supported, what music I liked etc. Well, I knew some Nigerian teams, not that I had seen them play live, just on TV. Supporting a football team seems so important to many ppl here in the UK but to be honest, I had never watched a match and I said Sheffield United, only because it was a team my Dad had supported at one time. I had never ever watched them play. Over the years I must have been asked that hundreds of times, I just say I dont support any team, just the national teams of England and Nigeria.
As for music, I only knew songs that other TCK’s I knew in Africa had played and some Churchy type songs played on Sundays in local languages, some in English too. To begin with I would say Classical as my dad played classical, but I didnt know the names of any classical songs.
I have a problem remembering names of songs and people. Is that a TCK thing? I forget people’s names all the time. Suppose ive known so manny ppl.
Religious issues were fun too. I can remember going to a Student Christian Union and there was some sort of war going on between Calvanists and Arminianists and strangely I did not see what the problem was as I could see both sides of the argument. Surely they were both right… Who knows.Same thing when I went and visited a Bible college in Nigeria, I argued both sides of the debate which totally blew some people away. I was for one side one minute and countering someone, then the other, countering someone else.
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February 17th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Ayako,
I am an AMK, and though I understand your lumping of all MKs into a “religious bundle” because of our parents’life work, there might be other people besides MKs who are deeply religious. I also know many MKs who are not religious at all.
I hope you understand the difference between “deeply religious” (people who are anal about rules and regulations…as far as I see it) and people who are trying to follow the Bible’s teaching as best as they understand, as humans.
I realize that the Bible is not “everyone’s cup of tea”. However, I don’t think it needs to be stated as an open-minded people vs deeply religious type of way.
There are many Christians who are very open to hear opinions of others and don’t condemn them to hell for their thoughts, or try to argue people to their side. And on the flip side, there are many “open-minded” people who try to argue people with strong convictions of right and wrong to not be so “close-minded” (which in the true sense of open mindedness, it would be ok to have strong convictions).
I do, as many people have (TCK or not), definite opinions about what I expect of my own life. I don’t like it when others try to shove their opinions and convictions down my throat.
I do, however, enjoy hearing of various convictions and seeing how I might incorporate/adjust those views into my overall thinking. Which points back to the openmindedness of TCKs, even though my parents were “deeply religious” missionaries.
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April 11th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Good one, Ayako. When reading the illustration, I couldn’t keep myself from laughing out loud.
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September 23rd, 2008 at 3:10 pm
That’s an interesting topic =).
As far as I am a mix of two different cultures and because I moved several times with my family, I think I have learned since a while to be tolerant and open-minded. I like to hear from people what they think about that and that and have discussions with people about several issues to know their opinions. I think being open-minded is a quality because if everybody would be open-minded, we would live in a world where it would be so nice to live in, with people less in conflict and open to everybody. Also, being open-minded allows us to let it go, and just avoid conflicts, be more in peace in everyday’s life. It also allows us to know more things because we are open to hear and live different things, so we can experience more things in a life than somebody closed-minded who doesn’t want to hear about something in particular.
At the same time, like some of you, when I have to make a choice between several things, I have great difficulties to choose because I think everything has qualities and advantages. And by the way, I don’t like to make choices and I prefer people to choose for me. My father told me I have to be more confident when making choice, but I don’t like imposing things to people.
I think open-mindedness is more a quality than a default but you are right, in some particular cases, it could be a weakness compared with people who are straight-forward.
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September 23rd, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Kristina: I read back what I wrote and I don’t think I lumped MKs into any group at all. In fact I never said deeply religious people weren’t open minded. I simply was explaining why Americans seemed to come across as unreasonable regarding abortion to people who aren’t religious Christians.
I wrote: Tess: I don’t want to offend any missionary kids on this site, but this has a lot to do with Americans who are deeply religious.
I grew up around ‘deeply religious’ Americans.
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Let me clarify. The deeply religious Americans I grew-up with were not MKs at all. They were dependents of scientists in fact but were religious and believed in Adam & Eve over Darwin.
I don’t know any missionary kids on a person level so I can’t say they are religious or not religious.
However I didn’t want to offend any missionary kids since their parents are missionaries after all…hence the comment about MKs.
My post was just an explanatory statement regarding another comment made about Americans and how they were unreasonable about abortion issues.
In fact I even wrote another post:
“Might I add that for those of us who aren’t deeply religious - we also need to be open minded about people who are ‘deeply religious’.
They think in a different way than we do - and although we may not agree with their way of thinking - it’s their way!
Nothing can be done about it, you know? ”
Sorry if it came across that way to you but I think you’ve misunderstood my post.
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September 24th, 2008 at 6:56 am
My openmindedness manifests in indecisiveness which is bad
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