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Parents with bilingual children, how did you do it? (lemdro.id)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Although I mention parents specifically in the title, this isn’t just for parents to respond.

My wife and I are trying to raise our child to be bilingual (English and Portuguese). Currently we’re both speaking a bit of both to our child and when they eventually go to school we’ll speak more Portuguese as they’ll be exposed to English everywhere else.

Is this a good approach or is there something we can do better?

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[–] redbr64 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

How well this goes depends on a lot of factors: are those languages native to either parent? What language is spoken where you live? Do you have other people in their lives that speak these languages? Are there other contexts in which those languages are spoken beyond the home (social occasions, TV, etc)?

Apparently, for it to really stick, it takes a lot more than just a parent speaking. I recommend listening to this podcast episode with a researcher that runs a bilingual child development lab. TBH, it's a bit disheartening to hear how hard it is to make it work: https://yourparentingmojo.com/captivate-podcast/bilingual/

The questions I asked above come from listening to that. Another big takeaway is consistency. One parent should stick to only one language talking to the kid.

I live in the US and I am a native Portuguese speaker, and my wife is a native Farsi speaker. We both spoke our own languages to our kid, and at age 2 he would mostly only speak those languages, and would even translate between them naturally (like I would say "go tell mom X" in Portuguese, and he would go and tell her in Farsi). But at age 3 he started just replying in English... Even went to Iran at 4, and could understand all his cousins but only replied in English. Farsi had a better shot because he has more exposure to it than Portuguese, but still... Honestly, it's one of my bigger disappointments in my parenting because it was really important to me, but I myself fumbled with it: when he started speaking in English to me, I started sometimes mixing it up and responding in English, which is not good for this (I have lived in the US since high school, so it's honestly a little easier for me at this point too). I was also a little concerned about his development in English and communication with his friends in school, but that's not necessary, that will come no matter what, so stick with it. My brother also lives in the US and is married to another Portuguese speaker, so his 2 kids born here speak it just fine since it was the only language at home. Their grammar and vocabulary is a little weird, but they can get by just fine.

Edit: sorry for any repetition, when I went to comment I couldn't see any other comments for some reason and thought I was the first to respond