How to Approach Raising Bilingual Children: One Perspective
A look at common methods and how to use them
I am raising two bilingual daughters, a teen, and a toddler. The older one is actually trilingual, but I don’t want to brag. When she was little, people would often tell me how lucky she was to be exposed to three languages. My tongue-in-cheek response was that she will either be brilliant or have multiple personalities, fingers crossed for the former.
While pregnant for the first time in 2004, I researched and read everything I could get my hands on about how to raise multilingual children correctly. Because, you know, I didn’t want to do it wrong. Spoiler alert: there is no right way or wrong way to teach your children to be multilingual. There are a lot of different methods, and they all work.
Methods to Teach Our Kids Language
There are several methods to choose from when raising multilingual children.
There is the OPOL method that advocates for one parent to speak one language while the other parent speaks the second language. This method works best with families where each parent has a different native language. The problem with this method is that the child will always hear the parents talking to each other in one language; most bilingual…
