How I Raised My Children Bilingual Without Hiring Teachers
When I was sixteen, the only question I could answer in English was about my name. As a high school student I did not have a clue, that I was at a point when I would abandon my original plan of becoming a doctor and throw myself into cramming eight years’ worth of English-language school classes so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of the examination board twelve months later. Without any valid reason, I had chosen linguistics over medical school and that had changed the course of my life.
Fast-forward fourteen years. Having worked as a consecutive translator, a PR specialist, a teacher, I stepped into motherhood. Somewhere at the backside of my mind, the thought of raising bilingual children seemed very alluring. Yet, no action followed for three more years.
My daughter was three and my son was two, when the eureka moment happened and I realised, “If not now, when?” The following day my children woke up to an English-speaking mother.
“From one extreme to another,” you might say. Still, at the time it seemed the decision was right and would help accelerate the growth of the planted seeds.
We lived a secluded life on the outskirts of Moscow with only a handful of private houses around. I had all the time in the world to carry out my bold experiment. I had linguistic resources and the full support of my Russian and Armenian-speaking husband.
The first year was the most challenging. People around spoke Russian, and it was my responsibility to ensure that my children were exposed to English every day. It was also challenging because at the beginning our communication was one-sided: I addressed my children in English, fed them in English, played with them in English, bathed them in English and even told them off in English too (The “even” is not accidental, as it is very common for bilingual families to switch to their native language at the times of stress or conflict).
It took my son about four months to produce his first sentence in English in response to my question, “How did you sleep today, darling?” The moment I knew that my efforts had finally paid off.
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Discoveries and main challenges
Related to children
Here are some discoveries I made along the way:
- I encountered no resistance or adverse reaction towards English with my kids being three and two, when we started.
- One to three-year-old kids do not care what language their mom speaks to them. What they care about is their mom being there for them.
- Children can easily imitate new sounds and reproduce them perfectly. There is no need to explain to them where to place their tongue, how to form their lips, etc. My kids now speak with an accent very similar to mine.
There are three main stages that children go through as they acquire a different language:
1. Silent stage, when the child is accumulating vocabulary and focusing all their energy to understand speech addressed to them;
2. Ingenuity stage, when the child mixes two languages because they want to react fast and finds the process of searching for the right word too time-consuming;
3. Differentiation stage, when the child sticks to one language, stopping the urge to borrow words from a different language.
Related to parents
Living life in English as a parent on a mission is a full-time job. If it is something you are now considering, keep the below hard-learnt leassons in mind.
- Discipline and consistency is everything. Speaking English every day must become a habit;
- Children’s curiosity is limitless, as a result your confidence as a non-native English language speaker is often tested encouraging you to learn, learn, and learn;
- You are bound to find yourself in situations when people will disapprove and give advice questioning your decision to raise a bilingual child;
- Not allowing setbacks to demotivate you is what you need to learn to practise. I used to will myself to carry on in spite of fear, laziness, or the absence of immediate gratification.
Today my children are eleven and nine, they can communicate in Russian and English fluently. I can now proudly say that the experiment has been worth the effort.
