Raising Kids Bilingual-Trouble with Grandparents

[bilingualbabies]

Posting as I’m genuinely wondering if I’m being unreasonable to want my parents to be more accepting of the fact that we are raising our kids bilingual. For background, my parents are extremely insecure and can be very controlling in their behavior. That said, I still love them and want to maintain a relationship with them.

We live in the U.K. and they are in the U.S. Husband’s native language is Spanish and my Spanish is decent. I’ve always valued multilingualism and learning about other cultures so we were both very keen to teach kids Spanish. We live in an area where there are few Spanish speakers so it’s really down to us to help the kids learn, so we’re really focused on getting them to speak it in the house as much as we can. My youngest child is just learning to speak so this is extra important and we encourage our older child to speak Spanish with the little one too.

Recently my parents have fixated on this as they’ll hear the kids speaking in Spanish when we video chat. Or the little one will say a Spanish word. We normally translate but we might miss things from time to time if the kids are chattering to themselves and we are talking to my parents. Their perspective is they feel left out and want to know what the kids are saying. Our perspective is we want the kids to know Spanish and feel proud of that part of their culture/heritage. The oldest always speaks in English to her grandparents. She’s old enough to know how to code switch. She will speak Spanish to her dad/my husband sometimes but it’ll be something like “Can I watch TV?” or something irrelevant to the conversation with my parents. Or husband might walk into the room during a video call and naturally speak Spanish with the kids as we’re literally in our own home.

We only visit once a year at most so not much in person interaction, but it’s really stressing me out on how to respond. I understand them wanting to understand the kids, and we’re happy to translate if they ask what was said and usually do this automatically. But they are insisting the kids, husband and I ALWAYS speak 100% English in front of them because we’re being rude and leaving them out.

So AIBU? If anyone’s been in a similar situation I’d really like to hear what you chose to do and how things worked out.

I think that you are unreasonable not to encourage your family to speak English to their grandparents when on video calls or in their presence.
Im English and two of my grandchildren are half Welsh , brought up in wales by their mother after divorce . Welsh is , and always has been their first language but they also speak fluent English like our side of the family and they always speak English in front of me .
I only really hear them speak Welsh if I ask them to eg when I asked them the Welsh word for microwave which is funny by the way . I’m sure your children will grow up bi-lingual but it won’t harm them to leave Spanish to one side when they know granny is on the phone .

You sound lovely and very understanding of your parents' quirks. You are bending over backwards not to offend them. Unfortunately, they are bigots and their utter rejection of even hearing their grandchildren speaking Spanish on a cute video is unacceptable. I assume that they objected to you marrying a Puerto Rican man. Are they polite to your husband? What does he think about them and their complete rejection of his heritage?

I think that you are unreasonable not to encourage your family to speak English to their grandparents when on video calls or in their presence.

They are small children. The youngest is only just learning to speak at all! The OP says the older child does mostly speak English when they're on a call to the grandparents and is learning to code switch. It's completely unreasonable to expect small children to have total control over what they say and to resist ever slipping into a few words in a language they are used to using with each other at home. They don't need 'encouragement' to control their speech - this level of control and code switching skill comes with age.

As parents you are 100 percent doing the right thing, bilingualism is a huge gift for kids in many many ways.

I think what I’d do is try and get them positively involved in supporting the kids English on calls. So maybe ask them to read English books to them over video call. It’s good for kids to learn from a variety of voices, and a few books will make zero difference to the bilingualism.

I would watch this carefully as the kids grow though, because I’m worried it’s coming from a position of “English is best” and you definitely don’t want things corrected like speaking Spanish to a native Spanish speaker in the US.

@winnieanddaisy , the Welsh word for microwave is micro-don, and I can't see why that's funny.

So you only encourage your FC to speak a Welsh word so you can mock the Welsh language as you think it's funny? Nice.

It is funny though and we don't mind.

@justasking111 ,Please explain why micro-don (pron. MiCK-roh DON) is funny.

my children are bilingual, we live in the uk, my DP is British, I’m not. I’m very persistent with my native language but it’s very hard. Well done you’re doing everything you can to teach them Spanish.
however when we’re on the video call with my parents or when they’re physically around I’m constantly reminding the kids to speak my native language between each other and to me. They switch languages depending who they’re talking to but they speak English between each other or to me, especially the 3yo. When we’re in presence of people who don’t speak our language we only speak English so our friends don’t feel excluded/awkward. You can have the rule - we speak English when talking to the GPs.

As they are children they probably say popty ping. It's cute. When I moved to England I was forever being asked to pronounce llanfairpg in full.