Raising Multilingual Children

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Christian in Laramie, Wyoming.

Hey, Christian, welcome to the show.

What’s up?

So, I got married a couple months ago, and I have kind of a big hypothetical question for you.

My wife and I are planning on having a kid or kids at some point, and she is a native French speaker from Cameroon. I’m a native English speaker who is a Spanish teacher, and we have the idea to try and raise children trilingually. And what I mean by that is try to speak to them as much as possible in French and Spanish in our house, and then kind of just let English take care of itself. So I was wondering if this has been done, if there’s been any studies about it and any advice that you all might have for us as we try this out.

Interesting.

Okay.

What good is having kids if you can’t do some linguistic experiments?

Yeah, experimenting on kids is a, yeah, that’s a tried and true tradition with all parents.

My wife would let me put my son in a Skinner box, so I was going to try that.

So let’s see, Christian, your wife is from Cameroon.

-huh.

And she speaks French?

She does, yes.

Any other languages?

No, she had some for parents’ native language in the home, but she isn’t proficient as a speaker.

But she has English as well?

Oh, yes.

She does speak English.

And actually, she and I primarily speak English with each other.

Okay.

And there, right there, that line right there is the whole heart of going to be your difficulty, okay?

-huh.

It’s the two of you trying to avoid talking English to each other in front of the children.

Because that is where you’re going to triply, quadruply, even more reinforce English in their minds is the key language that they need to know.

So do you speak French?

Did we establish that?

We did not establish that.

And I’m working hard.

I’m at beginner, intermediate level, I’d say.

Okay.

But you’re fluent in Spanish.

Yeah.

Okay.

Oh, this is interesting.

I give myself, you know, quote unquote, near native level on Spanish.

So your wife is teaching you French.

She is.

Like, I didn’t want to put that entire burden on her, so I’m trying to seek out, you know, some independent French instruction, and then I bring that back home and then try out some conversation with her and stuff like that.

So I think that’s the model for us.

Okay.

So there’s a lot to say.

This is a big one.

There’s a lot to say about this.

Let me talk about a little bit of what I’ve learned from others who’ve tried to do this.

One, when I lived in Paris, I knew an American who his teacher was his father-in-law, and it worked remarkably well.

It wasn’t as fraught with tension as you might think.

It actually gave them an amazing relationship where they could go to museums together and sporting events together.

And I don’t know if your in-laws are accessible to you, but I would recommend something like that if you can, because they became like best friends and this American learned French very well from his father-in-law.

The other thing is kind of a chance to endear myself a little bit to the in-laws.

Yeah, I mean, it’s not sucking up so much.

It’s like putting yourself before them saying, I need you.

I need you to help me.

And everyone loves to be needed in some ways, right?

If you don’t have that, the other alternative is here, just kind of accept from the start that the English is going to win.

And I hate to say this.

The people that I know that have successfully made their children multilingual have split their lives between two or three countries.

I know one family where they’re French, Peruvian, and so they speak English, Spanish, and French, and it is a struggle to get that French and Spanish into their kids.

It’s really difficult.

Even though they go to Peru all the time, they go to France all the time, they consume French media, their kids study French and Spanish in school.

The kids are basically English speakers with polite levels of French and Spanish.

And does one parent specifically do French and the other parent specifically does Spanish?

I’m not quite sure of the arrangement.

I know that they tried that for a while, but both parents actually speak French fluently, perfectly.

One of them speaks Spanish perfectly, so French was kind of the language of the household, and actually French is like the second language before Spanish.

But they live in New York, so Spanish is a constant presence there, so that’s kind of helped a little bit.

The other thing that I would say about this is if you can accept that English is going to win out and be the number one language, it’s going to do a lot to take a lot of guilt away from this process.

You won’t feel like you have deprived them of their heritage or their opportunities that could come from knowing three languages.

But you’re going, I mean, we’re talking having the radio on in French and Spanish all the time.

We’re talking television in French and Spanish, French and Spanish books and newspapers.

They need to be studying these languages like from as soon as they start school.

They need to have like a tutor or classes in these languages.

It takes a constant, consistent, expensive effort to pull this off.

I’ll throw a couple other things here that may or may not be useful for you.

I don’t know what your travel budget is like, but once the kids are old enough to travel easily and kind of not have to be carried or pushed in a stroller, get yourself to the nearest Spanish and French-speaking cities as often as you can.

I mean, do, you know, Montreal and I don’t even know, Miami as often as you can.

You know, one other suggestion, Christian, is that you might look for multilingual playgroups.

There are such things.

In fact, there’s a great website called multilingualchildren.org that gives you tips for forming that kind of playgroup so you can get the kid out of the house and have them interact with kids who are going through the very same thing.

So that might be helpful as well.

But good luck with that challenge.

It’s too early to be researching full immersion schools.

I assume that Laramie is not that large.

But here in San Diego, we have full immersion German, Chinese, and Spanish.

Great.

Well, yeah, if we stick around Laramie, that’s probably not a great option.

But if we end up in a more urban city, that would certainly be something to look into.

Well, Christian, we admire your goals.

Yeah, and know what? Call us in a few years when the kids are born.

We want to see photos and we want to hear how it’s going.

Yeah, have them call us and talk to us in French.

All right.

I sure will.

I really appreciate it.

Okay.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

I can’t tell you the number of families that I know that went in it with the best intentions and a full plan, and by age three or four, the kids are basically English speakers with a few polite words of the other language.

I would love to hear stories from our listeners about this.

Call us and talk to us about that, 877-929-9673, or send your story to words@waywordradio.org.

We would love to hear your experience in trying to raise children to be trilingual, as they suggested.

How did you do it? Did it work? Let us know.