Bilingual children

[sunshinebaby2018]

Whats the best way to raise bilingual children? Each parent to only speak to them their own language and choose the language of where you like to communicate all together? Or the opposite language of where you live so they learn that as well as the native language they will hear around them anyway? Any good sources / tips / blogs/ books around this?

have a look at this blog here x

DS is still a small baby so we don't know the results yet, but we are doing OPOL (one parent one language), then as a family speaking English (the minority language). I am at home with DS so he will get more exposure to the minority language in the first few years until he starts nursery.

I would always be wary of not speaking your native language to your child unless you are truly fully fluent or bilingual, but there are various other factors to consider:

Is the primary carer's native language the minority or community one?
Will the child get much exposure to the minority language (childcare, family, playgroups/school etc) other than from the parent?

There is a FB group called raising bilingual/multilingual children where you can get lots of great advice and insight from experienced parents. There are also millions of books. Adam Back, 'Maximise your Child's Bilingual Ability' and Annika Bourgogne 'Be Bilingual, Practical Ideas for Multilingual Families' both offer useful pratical suggestions.

There are different ways of doing it and not necessarily one best way, any way than there is one best way of parenting. Parents often get very hung up on whatever method worked for them and insist that it's the only possible way.

The one thing that really matters is that you get enough exposure in to any language you want your child to speak. There must be situations where they need to speak that language and there must be situations where they want to speak that language. It needs to be fun as much as anything else.

We didn't do full OPOL, but then we had the opportunity of spending our holidays in my country surrounded by family speaking only the minority language, and even dh only spoke the minority language when in the company of my family. So the fact that I also did dc's reading with them in the majority language and spoke to their friends in the majority language didn't seem that much of an issue.

They are now grown up and will both revert to the minority language when e.g. speaking to me on the phone, they both keep in touch with their cousins in the minority language and dd at least reads a lot in the minority language (ds doesn't read in any language if he can help it).

My friend's parents did OPOL and it worked well for her. She now does it with her kids so they speak four languages!

My college is doing just Russian (her language) not Arabic (her DH's) because one child struggled with English.

Horses for courses I think.

Colleague not college!