The 5 Most Common Myths About Raising Bilingual Children

“Doesn’t she speak English? Oh, I knit -- Swedish and English. Doesn’t that get kind of confusing? Swedish, you said — when will she need that?” Prepare to hear more of this kind of thing. You’ll hear from the barista at Starbucks, your mother-in-law, even your neighbors and strangers on the street. Keep in mind that being a trendsetter always can ruffle some feathers and the best thing (other than running for the door) to do when dealing with unsolicited advice is to know the facts for yourself.

The most common myths about raising bilingual children:

“Your child will be confused if they learn more than one language.

It is a belief common in monolingual countries and backed by a great deal more politics than science. Have no fear, your child’s little brain has plenty of neurons to spare firing off to handle two languages (or more) without frizzing out in the process. For the most part, decades of studies in hundreds of research papers suggest quite the reverse: that being multilingual brings distinct cognitive benefits. And the experience of millions of families worldwide, where being multilingual is the rule, not the exception? Just look at Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and Finland — to name a few.

“I can see two languages, maybe — but more than that is too much.”

Given all there is for babies to learn in their first years of life, another language doesn’t add that much more to the workload. If the child is receiving regular exposure and use of the second (or third) language, then there will be no problem. This is precisely why a two year old has fifty percent more synapses than an adult! I will say this: even if your child never speaks all the languages, don’t underestimate the value of a passive language, i.e., understanding the language but not yet speaking it. If you already know a language, learning it in school later on (or as an adult) is orders of magnitude easier than someone who’d never heard it before. Thus, even merely learning another language is certainly not a wasted effort.

“You know your kid is going to mix all these languages up.

Some mixing will happen, of course, but that is both benign and time-limited. As she builds her vocabulary in each language, this automatic phenomenon goes away. How - How many monolingual children automatically self-correct after receiving sufficient modelling of correct usage?

For example, children start off saying “Me want,” to mean “I want.” And at five, how many of them are still going, “Me want”? The multilingual child learns correct usage the same way any other child does eventually. If you don’t switch languages in your own speech, it will be much easier for your child to stay consistent too.

“Why start now? Then your child will learn it in no time.”

For all of you who think that being multilingual is a daunting intellectual burden for your child, there will be others in the comments who will swear it’s a piece of cake. “Just go to a Spanish playgroup once a week. You don’t have to always say it yourself to her!” This is highly unrealistic. Research suggests that children will become actively bilingual if they receive exposure to another language about a third of their waking hours. They’ll get a lot with less speaking, but they probably won’t have any themselves.” For children, learning a second language is easy, compared to adults, but a child needs to have heard a word many thousands of times and in every possible context before it registers — unless it’s a bad word, then somehow you only have to say it once...

“Reading and writing in different languages? Some of our kids can’t even handle that in one language.’”

It’s also true that reading and writing well is a challenge for many children. But reading and writing is a ‘coding / decoding’ process and does not necessarily depend on the number of languages a child speaks, as such — even if it involves different alphabets and so may be a little more effort. It might also be that access to multiple languages makes it easier for kids to grasp that language itself has a structure, which has a positive impact on the development of general literacy skills. Research validates what many parents have thought for a long time: multilingual children tend to have stronger linguistic skills.

If you are still in a hurry or discover that politely tuning out the baseless opinions hurled your way does not do much good, you can always inquire whether they think Einstein’s intellect was impaired having been raised as both a German and Italian. And, he didn’t begin talking until he turned three, either, but by golly did he make up for lost time.