Starting a family - tips to achieve bilingualism please - au pairs etc

[SweetPea3]

Hi all

I live in London and am pregnant with my first child. DH and I are both English, but DH has Italian heritage and speaks Italian (as a result of having to communicate with his grandparents), albeit in a very basic way - maybe to the standard of a seven y.o. iykwim.

I would love our children to be bilingual, and so would DH in theory, but in practice I anticipate that he will find it too much effort to speak to them in Italian (due to limited vocabulary, zero understanding of grammar, and general laziness when it comes to this kind of thing).

We would be prepared to get an Italian nanny/au pair, and my main question is when we should start this? Is it essential/very beneficial in the first year, or mainly just from the time a child starts to speak? I guess ideally I would prefer to wait till I am pregnant with #2 before getting someone in.

Are there any websites you can recommend which give general advice/research on how to encourage bilingualism in children?

Any other tips would be very welcome, including any info you may have on how I might go about finding an Italian nanny/au pair.

Many thanks!

My dd started when she was 2.6 but that was weekly French classes. A year and a half later she started Mandarin and a year after that Spanish. She gets hourly weekly lessons and her Spanish teacher today said dd, now 7 is at year 6 level. I cannot advise what you do but am telling you my personal experience. Dd is only starting to read and write English but can already write some Mandarin.
I think there is an Italian playgroup in the Ealing area.

I'd say from birth but if relying on the au pair as the Italian environment, you'll have to continue with the arrangement for an awful long time, I'm talking years, and then you'd have to have a consistent and constant enough environment and also to achieve speech, also the "need" to speak Italian - if the au pair is the only person around who speaks Italian and everyone else around, in the family, at school, in the wider community all speak English, then you may end up with a child unwilling to speak Italian even though they can. If a child is immersed in another language before the age of about 8, it's supposed to take 4 years worth of constant exposure, before it then is likely to stay planted in their brain, so that if you lose that language environment (say moving country), it stays in their brain well that's what someone posted on here recently and when I read up about it, I had to agree that this assertion could be right it's widely reported that children who are bilingual by immersion when young and then lose the environment in which they speak a language can quickly lose bilingualism in that language. BTW for me bilingualism is when you can think and dream in 2 or more languages. I'm pretty fluent in French and work in French but would not think myself bilngual. Our 3 youngest children I would certainly count as bilingual - yes they dream aloud in French and English.

Thank you for this.

Natation, totally understand your point re the true meaning/extent of "bilingualism". I'm not so concerned with bilingualism in the strict sense of the word - I guess what I want is for the language to feel intuitive so they don't have to sit down and properly study it to learn it from scratch as a second language.

Thanks again!

Would it not be more effective to start visiting Italian relatives and building up a "need" to speak Italian?

Oh maybe I'm a big humbug, but firstly I couldn't stand having to share my personal life with someone else full time for 5 years or more, just in the hope my child will understand and possibly speak another language, secondly, even if I had a big enough income to pay for this, I would prefer to spend the 25k plus (over 5 years for an au pair) on relocating abroad where you would have a consistent and constant language environment and a need to use that language on a daily basis.

Sorry don't mean to offend, but yes it's a great idea in theory, but you have someone who you say can already speak Italian in the family, I'd ask them to start speaking exclusive Italian, so why take on an au pair from Italy just because of the language?

I think on the whole I agree with natation. Even if you do manage to secure an au-pair for 5 years or so, she will only be one person in your dc's life to represent Italian culture. And you don't even have any guarantee that she will be a person who is very good at talking to children- to instill bilingualism you need quite a high level of input.

By the time he is 3 he may well have decided that if this is only about pleasing the au pair- who isn't even his mum and clearly can speak English anyway as she takes him to playschool/the shops/the surgery etc- then it is not worth the effort and he'd rather be like everybody else.

Ime the kind of natural bilingualism you are thinking of is very much about identity: a child will acquire it if they feel it is a basic part of who they are. Which is going to be harder to maintain once he has sussed that his own dad who is Italian can't be bothered to do it.

I spent many happy childhood hours with my best friend's Finnish speaking family: I never learnt to speak Finnish. Otoh I did learn to speak very good English, because I was taught to by my mother, a person who meant a lot to me, and I could see how much the English language meant to her.

I think the au pair might be a start, but she needs to come as part of a package; you would also need to do other things to make it worth while for your dc to keep on speaking Italian; you'd need to make it part of his life.