Shamed by HV for not exposing DD to a second language

[Skedaddledaway]

I had DDs 12 months appointment yesterday. This time was better than previous times as she only managed to say something vaguely offensive 3 times during the 10 minute appointment.

However, there was one comment she made that filled me up with 'mum guilt' about not exposing DD to a second language. I live in a very multicultural area where most children are being brought learning 2 or 3 languages so seeing a child just speaking English is probably less common.

I speak good french (lived and worked in France for several years) but haven't used french for at least 4 years so am rusty! Speaking french with DD didn't feel natural compared to using my mother tongue. Now I am questioning whether that was a poor decision.

As a single mum I have a lot on my plate but I am thinking of starting to expose DD to some french.
My thoughts were:

• Turning her doll into a francophone so when ever we play with it use french.
• incorporating some simple everyday phrases into our daily routine
• reading books in french in the morning during breakfast
• listening to some nursery rhymes in french

Does this approach sound reasonable?

Presumably all the other languages Londoners speak?

I've heard so many awful stories from good, sensible friends (both intellectually competent and not prone to maliciousness) that I can completely believe what OP is saying.

I think she's a bit batshit.

If one of the parents has a different native language so that it can easily be incorporated then that's different. One parent alone attempting to speak two languages one of which is not native is a bit much.

Obviously but the op doesn’t speak these other languages as her mother tongue. What other languages do you think the op should use in her family?

Lol 😂 what an insane health visitor. Expecting an English mother to speak to her child in any other language than English. Great if you know French and can teach her some but it’s hardly letting her down is it? Was she English?

@Earsareitchy why are you so adamant? You weren't in the room, you can't know. And some HV ARE shit.

If you think OP is a troll, report. Otherwise, accept that other people's experiences are different to yours. Doesn't mean they are lying.

Your HV sounds bonkers

So I am in the UK so with the possible exception of parts of Wales this kind of shaming just wouldn’t happen. However I have heard of parents deciding not to introduce a second language at home because doing so might cause speech delay. Do you feel you are being criticised for being a single mum in a roundabout way?
If French is commonly spoken where you live then maybe introducing some early ( but not perhaps at 12 months) might be sensible but other wise I don’t think you should worry about it .

Eh?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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 😂

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