Shamed by HV for not exposing DD to a second language

This is a wind up? I’m at a loss for words.
if this is true I’d seriously ignore her advice.

Tell the HV to go fxxx themselves. It's none of her business whatsoever. In fact, I'd probably report her.

Ignore the HV & forget it.

I disagree, telling someone they’re letting someone else down absolutely infers she should be ashamed she’s not made the effort.

this is right up there with the garbage from HVs I got when mine were small. “You’ll want to stop breastfeeding her now she’s 9 months old”
”you’d better get her into a nice front facing car seat soon now she’s nearly a year”

smile and ignore

Don’t worry about it - I speak 3 languages fluently (one I learned from birth as we lived in that country, second was English which I learned at 5 when we moved to England and is now my
’native tongue’ and one I learned as an adult living & working in that country), but to my children I only spoke English with occasional words / phrases from my other languages thrown in. My eldest son is 13 and excelling at 3 modern foreign languages at a very selective school, and my younger son is 11 (year 6) and so far is only learning French but is already reasonably good at it. So their lack of long term exposure to other languages when they were babies / toddlers / young children (other than on holiday or hearing grandparents speak) has had no effect on their ability in languages whatsoever! If I were you I would ignore the HV, you’re probably doing a great job, and she couldn’t find anything to complain about so made something up!

Do speak to her in your rusty French. Don't worry about English she will pick that up anyway. Speaking more than one language has so many advantages and offers some dementia protection. I am a childminder in Newham and 90% of the children I have speak 2 plus languages.

However, there was one comment she made that filled me up with 'mum guilt' about not exposing DD to a second language.

I took DD to a bilingual baby group, played her nursery rhymes in french from birth and read a couple of french books.

These cannot both be true, @Skedaddledaway. If you have exposed her to a second language, via the baby group, nursery rhymes and books, your first post doesn't make sense- the health visitor can't shame you for not doing something that you are, in fact, doing.

Also:
I am thinking of starting to expose DD to some french

How can you start to expose her to something you say she's been exposed to since birth?

Sounds like it's not so bad in Sweden then, if it was you'd certainly know about it.

I know how I used to overanalyse with my first child and be anxious to get things right. To be fair, that anxiety has created a very intelligent teenager who is fairly studious. So just be reassured, the fact you feel guilt about doing it right tells me you are doing a great job.
I have read up on bilingualism and my kids are bilingual. I am mother tongue english and we live abroad so we do minority language at home with me, and a mix with their dad. Most of the literature agrees that bilingualism relies on exposure to other mother tongue speakers. Even at c1 level you'll be making errors in your french and culturally your language will be less rich (you won't know your own childhood nursery rhymes, your mother's sayings etc). Your approach is the right one, to incorporate some french if you enjoy it and to do it in a fun way. The easiest way is actually just pretend your TV only has french, your radio is only in french etc. That would give them a huge amount of latent language. Few people would do that though unless they were true Francophiles. I think the health visitor is being very weird. Yes, she's going to meet lots of bilingual kids as they have parents who are first or second generation immigrants. That's not your situation!

Change HV if that's possible. They are supposed to support you, not shame you.
As a single parent it would be very difficult to introduce a second language in the same way that two parents can (mummy speaks like this but daddy says...). Your child will get horribly confused. If it's important to you (and f*ck what HV thinks), then you can expose your child via TV, language clubs, games, etc, when they're a little older.

In official and legal senses, it is equivalent; and it can be the case that a class has their Swedish lessons together, but some are assessed for the SVA course and some for Swedish. But as you mention, in reality, anecdotally it is not ranked quite as highly so if eg. admissions staff or employers are looking at which courses a pupil took rather than just points, then there is possibly still some bias there :-( But i’m not sure of the actual prevalence of this…. Interesting re the Finnish equivalent - I haven’t heard of similar issues here but I am certain they must be happen. My eldest has moved from SVA into Swedish (within the same class) but not my littlest yet, so we’ll see what happens there

Is the SVA course considered to be on the same level as mother tongue Swedish? Because in Finland we have S2 which is Finnish as a second language for children who don't have Finnish as their mother tongue but it's definitely considered lesser, and in some schools they also teach other subjects differently to S2 students, so they're not getting the same level of education. It's become quite notorious, with immigrant parents wanting to get their children out of S2 and into the normal Finnish lessons (thankfully both my children were taken out of S2 early by the school as they proved their abilities and its a good school, DD in 2nd grade and DS half way through preschool)

I'd stop going to see the HV if I were you. Some of them do seem to take great pleasure in making you feel bad about yourself.

Christ, chill your interrogative tits, Mrs Health Visitor.

This has touched your nerve hasn't it. Wonder why .....

With that said, one thing that is true is that Sweden has a particularly positive attitude towards multilingualism that is reflected in its legislation around language and in the support multilingual children get in school, for example. Children have the right to weekly lessons in their first language(s), to enable them to develop in that or those languages as well as Swedish. Sweden also has the school subject SVA which is basically the same course as Swedish, and worth the same amount of grade points for getting into sixth form education, but which is specifically aimed at second language speakers.

There isn’t any harm in introducing a foreign language for fun with preschoolers, in the same way there isn’t any harm in them trying out football or gymnastics or nature club or whatever. But with a child of 12 months, there would arguably be more potential problems than benefits if a close caregiver is systematically or semi systematically using a foreign language for the purpose of teaching it to the child, when that language is not their first language. Listening to songs in other languages, especially familiar ones, looking at books in other languages as part of a broad repertoire of books shared together, talking about languages and countering deficit talk about multilingualism etc etc is fabulous and important. But the advice the OP got from the HV was poor at best.

I’m very very sceptical about that claim, and would love to see some sources. It’s not true of Scandinavia either - yes, there are large numbers of multilingual children in for example Sweden, but this is either because they have two first languages in the home, or because they have their first language and then start in preschool from an early age, and acquire Swedish as the societal shared language. But for many multilingual children like that, while they may have a functional everyday use of Swedish, they do not always have an equivalent functional ’school Swedish’. English is a large part of everyday life in Sweden, even for the youngest children, but they are absolutely not using it in an equivalent way to their first languages or to Swedish.

Scandinavia is similar.

You've never been to the Netherlands then? It's very normal for children and adults to speak English, French, Spanish, German etc well or even fluently (often more than one of these), not because they have these languages in their family environment but because they recognise the benefits of multilingualism.

The HV may well be being ridiculous in suggesting the OP is doing something wrong by not introducing a second language. And nobody should feel shamed by an HV into doing something they don't want to do.

But equally choosing to introduce a second language at a young age is not ridiculous at all and is actually beneficial.

Your HV sounds crackers. I would actually probably be reporting her back for some quite inappropriate comments that really aren't accurate as to child development.

OP - communicate with your child lots. Talk and sing and chat in your mother tongue. Children typically learn other languages at home where parents have not got the same mother tongue or in multigenerational households with a grandparents speaking a different language etc.

That’s sadly quite an uninformed answer. The reason for the OP to ignore the HV’s strange advice is nothing to do with being an anti-foreign Brit. It’s to do with the fact that it’s poor and inappropriate advice. You overgeneralise about ’other countries’ in a way that makes it sound like British parents with English as their sole first languages are just not bothering to raise their kids bilingual or multilingual. Whereas the reality is that in countries where children are bilingual or trilingual from birth or a very early age, it’s because they have more than one first language in the home, or perhaps in the immediate society around them.