Shamed by HV for not exposing DD to a second language

Are you in Hackney? The HV's in Hackney are kind of famous for being totally mental!

This hasn’t ever been mentioned in an HV meeting I had. And I’ve had them in bilingual areas.

i probably would have laughed in their face at the suggestion and said I’ll get to it when I get more than 3-5 hours asleep (unbroken) a night.

theres no rule that says you need to speak multiple languages. It’s obviously helpful and good to do, but parenting is a lot to do solo as it is.

if this has honestly upset you, maybe you’re feeling a bit worried generally? You’re doing a great job and you can’t do everything all of the time. If your kid is loved, fed and developing well that’s enough. All this extra is just that, good if you can but if not don’t worry.

Honestly, you could start a thread on batshit things HV's say.

I was told to eat more chicken and a friend of mine was told to look to Jesus....

But you do not speak fluent French,
4 years in France is not fluent or will ever be native/mother tongue. You speak good (rusty) French. I help DD with French homework (when the time came).I lived in and worked for, a French company for 10 years.

Stick to your mother tongue.

You know you don’t need to see this woman, right? HV are very hit or miss with any advice and cause more harm than good ime.

Another language is great but don’t feel obliged. As pp have said, the languages on offer at my dc school are German and Spanish. So unless you’re going fully immersive, it will be just another activity with your child. Nothing wrong with that but it’s not the amazing advantage that so many seem to think it is.

MIL took DD1 to a French group when she was very small, and I speak French. I think she had some toddler books in French. But this was when she was about three.

Unless you live in France don't worry about it now. With DD2 I hardly bothered as reading in/learning to speak in English was hard enough for her and another language would have just confused her.

I think it's a good thing when young children are exposed to other languages and cultures but bloody hell, it's not something a HV should be criticising you about at a 12 month appointment. She should be politely told to chuff off and stick to her actual job.

Sorry I haven’t read the full thread, and others might have picked up on this already, but no you absolutely don’t have to see the HV. It is optional. Use the service as and when it is useful to you, but don’t feel obliged to, particularly if you feel it is doing more harm than good.

This is only reasonable if your or your husband's first language is other than English. And I'm saying that as a mother of a bilingual child, but my first language is not English. I spoke to him in my mother tongue since he was born and he picked it up very quickly. But if we both only knew English, this wouldn't make any sense. Ignore that lady, she is clueless.

I agree - the health visitor seems to be entering the territory of child development beyond health.

I would be inclined to ask the health visitor in what way a child's health would be affected by only speaking one language.

Bonus points if you can do it in another language, badly 😂

You could teach your DD some rhyming slang (wot Londoners talk, innit?) and train her to berate the out-of-line HV with it. Eg "stop going north and south you dental flosser".
Otherwise if you don't need to see her, don't go, if you do need to see someone then report her. She's talking pony and trap, could be that's she's radio rental.
Learning one language well is great. If your child happens to be exposed to another language somehow (listening to you speak it, sing it, on TV, whatever) then that's nice but not essential. I don't really see her point. If you were purposefully withholding speaking in another language then that would be weird, but you're not.
Congrats on getting to 1, it's a big achievement. Well done, you!

Health Visitors are IME unbelievably badly informed about infant feeding and infant language input and are best ignored on both those issues.

Being brought up bilingual is an incredible skill.

However, the only real way to make this happen is to have a full time household member speaking a second language full time. My friend's daughter is trilingual due to having a Catalonian speaking mother, a Castilian speaking nanny and an English speaking father. Obviously it helps that Catalan and Castilian are similar. All the household members speak to the child ONLY in their native language.

You don't have the household set up to raise a bilingual child. Even children growing up in English speaking households in Welsh, who are immersed in Welsh nurseries from a young age, are rarely truly bilingual and instead speak Welsh as a second language.

Learning French as much as possible and introducing her to French sounds is wonderful though and you are doing a great thing if you keep doing that.

However, is your HV actually helping? It sounds like she's massively overstepping her remit by giving lots of opinions on parenting which is not her job. You can refuse the service if she's making your life harder.

If you live in the UK then the only language your child 'needs' to learn is English. If you or your partner or family had another language then by all means naturally introduce that, but anything else is just extra.

They will learn languages at school, so unless you're literally bilingual then there's no need to make your kid fluent in french, polish, Urdu etc.
As you won't be speaking it on a daily basis with them enough to practice.

Even in Wales hv don’t berate for not being bi lingual and it’s the law you must learn Welsh at school!

id ignore hv

You do not have to see a HV at all. It's not compulsory.
Ditch it and stop stressing. Simple.
Expose to French if you wish, don't if you don't. Your kid won't die if they're not bilingual at 12 months old.
Batshit

I’d take most things the HV says with a hearty pinch of salt.

Mine didn’t even know how her scales worked, resulting in inaccurate measurements and lots of unnecessary heartache and feeding interventions. On her 3rd visit i was feeling more confident and asked her to do it differently, lo and behold, my son was gaining weight nicely.

They seem to have their own bizarre hobby horses that have no basis in science. Your HV’s would appear to be multilingualism.

I think your HV is mad! Nobody in our house spoke any other language whatsoever. However this didn't stop eldest getting an A* in Spanish GCSE (and she's also able to convince a Welsh person she is Welsh with a South Wales accent)

Can you get another HV? This one sounds unhinged.

Like you my French is good and I used to do odd bits of French with DS and he is now very good at languages, which may or may not be a coincidence. But unless you have the opportunity to speak the language daily you aren't really going to reach anything like a meaningful level at this stage and it feels a bit forced.

The only people I know who are really bilingual have parents who speak different languages. One couple we know the wife is Brazilian and the husband is British but with Polish parents, their DCs speak three languages fluently. Another couple have Italian wife, English husband and the family lived in France where the DCs went to school, so they grew up speaking three languages every day. Both DCs (now adults) say their French got rusty quite quickly once they moved back to the UK.

I can’t see any reason why you would need to speak to your child in a language that isn’t your native tongue. I speak very good French (although I teach it I would never go so far to say I’m fluent!) but even though I am also half French, it was never my mother tongue (my dad didn’t bother speaking to us in French). I have done little bits of French with my son and will occasionally try basic instructions etc but he doesn’t like it and gets annoyed so I don’t really bother too much. He still has a long time to go until high school and exams so I’m not fussed for the moment.

Was the comment 'don't worry your mummy will send you to nursery soon' suggesting that DD would be in an environment where there's a high chance lots of different languages (mother tongues) will be spoken by the other children attending rather than a suggestion that foreign language learning will, and should, finally begin at the nursery?

I think that would be a slightly different emphasis - immersion in a multi-cultural setting is a good thing rather than learning another language per se.

Not that I'm agreeing with the HV's modus operandi.

She sounds nuts. Ds is bilingual as his dad is Arab. I know some Russian as I lived there but it wouldn’t even cross my mind to teach dc it.

I do think it can also cause speech delay. Ds1 has a slight speech delay and mixes up English and Arabic grammer. Ds2 who only speaks only English is speaking much quicker than ds1 did.

There are about 100 languages spoken in London, so that's going to take some doing. Especially given only about 8% of Brits can speak more than one language and a fair percentage struggle to master one.

Is this real? If it is your HV is a nutter.

Eh?