Raising multilingual children

It's not easy to raise a bilingual or multilingual child. The parents have to be committed and comfortable with the concept and they need to educate themselves. In some countries, it may be common to see children talking several different languages and parents are very comfortable with the concept. But in some countries people are not, and parents who want to raise multilingual children don't find any support to encourage them or worst ... they find a bunch of non-sayers.

It's pay to be well-prepared to the project because the parents (or one of the parents) may have a lack of support in the area, or doubts because it's a fastidious task and sometimes the children during the process may loose interest or may show more progress for a language and not for another.

The two most successful language systems are One Person One Language (OPOL) and Minority Language at Home (ML@H). For the first system a parent must be committed to speak one language and the other parent the other language. For the second system, both parents must be committed to speak the minority language at home and the baby will be immersed in the other language when he is in daycare or with his nanny. It's work for the single-parent family. Whatever system you use, you need to stick to it and be patient.

I am raising a bilingual child (English-French) and I recommend people who do the same to join a support group online to interact with like-minded parents. The reason is that you need support, you need to share, to ask, to be taught, to understand certain things because there are so many misinformation in our society about raising bilingual and multilingual children, so many non-sayers, that it won't be easy to pursue your goal if you have a lack of support.

My pediatrician doesn't know a lot about the subject ... (he told me to speak only English to my baby ... he knew that my native language was French ... he told me that the baby doesn't have to speak another language) ... so I had to educate myself reading several books on the subject after my baby was born and I received a lot of encouragements through online forums from like-minded parents.

My 3 years son is doing pretty well with both languages. He knows his letters, his numbers, the shapes, colors ... in both languages now. I teach him myself with books, songs and other activities.

In a future post, I will recommend some good online forums for parents who raise multilingual children and also I will recommend educational tools to help your multilingual child.

For now, I would like to hear from parents who raise or have raised multilingual children. You are welcome to share with others your challenges and success stories.

The pros and cons of raising a multilingual child.