Something to Speak of
Raising Bilingual Kids requires a serious commitment, but according to the experts, it's well worth the effort.
By András Szántó
I was mortified. I was an 8-year-old boy, it was my first day at Wessex Gardens primary school, in North London, and I didn't speak a word of English. That morning, my Hungarian mother handed me a salami sandwich and a note with some phrases that were supposed to help me navigate my new environment. Among them were "Can I have a glass of water?" and "Where can I find the toilet, please?"
I never ate the sandwich, and I found the bathroom on my own. But on that day in 1972, my journey into bilingualism began. At first I communicated through hand signs and drawings. Within three months, I understood most of what I heard around me. After a year, I spoke fluently with an accent that had become indistinguishable from my classmates'. I could still converse in Hungarian, but at home I used a peculiar kind of "Hunglish," an artful mishmash in which English words were woven through my Hungarian sentences. I recognize these verbal acrobatics today when I listen to Latino kids on the New York City subway.
English and Hungarian are now my two mother tongues (I studied three other languages between high school and university, but they don't even come close). I'm thankful to my parents for this amazing gift, which led me to America, where I met my wife. Being bilingual has made me more open and adaptable, I think. It would seem to follow that when you perceive reality via several languages, you can see more sides of a given situation. When I think about raising my own kids, I know I'll want them to have that kind of perspective—as well as a deep connection to their ancestral roots—as I did.
But surprisingly, many parents are nervous about going down the bilingual road. Some fear that their children will seem strange and have difficulty fitting in. Others shy away because of a widespread myth that bilingualism can lead to confusion and learning disabilities. Yet anecdotal experience and psychological research both suggest that the benefits of speaking a second or third language vastly outweigh the disadvantages.
The Benefits
Bilingual children "gain in their conceptual abilities and how they view the world," says Peggy McCardle, a linguist at the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in Rockville, Maryland. "Different languages state things in different ways, reflecting the culture in which each is spoken," she adds. "The typical example is how people living in Alaska think about snow, and have so many more refined words for it than folks living in the tropics."
"In the global culture, what could be more important than knowing several languages?" asks Orville Schell, dean of the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, who, with his Chinese-born wife, Baifang, has raised sons Sebastian and Sasha to speak three languages. The boys have interacted in Mandarin with their mother and her relatives ever since they could talk, and they were enrolled in a French lycée as soon as they hit school age. Now 13 and 14, they can switch effortlessly among English, Mandarin, and French. "They feel more confident and have an infinitely greater awareness of the world," Schell observes. "They are like skilled dancers or fine sportsmen who know that they have something of a secret power. They almost never find themselves embarrassed or fearful that they will be laughed at as they try to communicate."
Nineteen-year-old Sara Weschler of Pelham, New York, also displays a heightened comfort level with languages. The daughter of Polish international-relations expert Joanna Weschler and American writer Lawrence Weschler, she has spoken exclusively in Polish with her mother, her nannies, and her mother's relatives since early childhood. When she was younger, she even separated her stuffed animals into English and Polish speakers. "I had to translate between them, but my favorite teddy bear was, for some reason, bilingual like me," she recalls. Now, whether in a classroom or on trips abroad, she finds that language just sticks to her: In the past five years, she has picked up Spanish, French, Latin, and Swahili. "Speaking two such very different languages has made new ones much easier," she says. Her favorite website is an online etymological dictionary.
Some benefits of bi- and multilingualism lie below the surface. Language governs the way we connect to our surroundings, and each one contains its own multitude of signs and rules. In
The Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 1, the editors assert that "knowledge of language is knowledge of a nonphysical system with infinite combinatorial possibilities." And the more of these complex systems kids can wrangle, the better off they'll be.
The Research
Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at Toronto's York University and a leading researcher in the fields of bilingualism and cognition, has studied bilinguals for two decades and has a balanced view of the issue. "There is a lot of fear that exposing children to languages will cause confusion and harm," she observes. "Then there is all this hyperbole about incredible advantages—people who claim children who learn two languages will have higher IQs and better academic success. Neither view is correct."
According to Bialystok, there is "not a shred of evidence" of bilingualism causing confusion. Instead, she says, when kids use languages in a mixed way, "they show how clever they are in taking advantage of all the things they know how to communicate," using whatever linguistic tools are available to them. Studies of 2- to 4-month-old babies have found that they send out different brain signals in response to each language. In fact, the closer we are to birth, the better we are at discerning phonetic contrasts between languages. "Way before these children learn to speak, they understand that different languages are different systems," Bialystok says. "If they are not confused by two, they won't be by three." This also answers the old question about how soon children should be exposed to languages: never soon enough.
Researchers have confirmed that bilinguals (children and adults) can find it hard to retrieve words as quickly as their monolingual counterparts do. They tend to score lower than others on semantic-fluency tests, in which subjects are asked to do things like list as many animals as they can think of in 60 seconds. Studies have also shown that bi- and multilingual children start to speak slightly later than monolinguals, with a smaller pool of words. But while they may have a restricted vocabulary in each language, they do not have a smaller overall vocabulary. Over time, they catch up.
Such handicaps are a small price to pay when you consider bilinguals' cognitive strengths. Control of attention tops the list: They find it easier to stay focused, especially when confronted with inconsistent information. When psychologists show children cards that look like, say, a rabbit at first glance, then a duck after a closer look, most kids 7 and under can't change their minds once they've locked in on an interpretation. Bilinguals are less prone to this problem. "They see things in different ways and can more easily switch back and forth," says Bialystok. "It's good preparation for today's multitasking world."
In another study cited by Bialystok, monolinguals and bilinguals were asked to work on a computerized simulation of a basic everyday task: setting the table while cooking breakfast. The groups prepared the meal equally quickly, but they differed in how well they alternated between the activities. Bilinguals found it easier to interrupt their cooking and got further along with the secondary task.
And they also do well on the
Stroop test, which asks subjects to view internally contradictory cards—one on which the word blue is written in red ink, for instance. Monolinguals have a harder time correctly naming the color. Such information-sorting abilities are applicable to many tasks later in life that involve planning and organizing. The mental process of sorting takes place in the front part of the brain, which is the last to develop in babies. Research has found that when it comes to such frontal-lobe "executive" functions, bilingual children are often capable of doing at 4 years what monolinguals can't until they're 5.
The Challenge
Negotiating two languages in one household isn't easy. It requires energy and discipline that go beyond the usual challenges of child-rearing. Experts believe that success hinges above all on consistency. If two parents decide to each speak a different language with their children, each should speak only that language. And if there are friends or relatives around who also speak that second language, it's good to let the children hear it from a variety of sources.
Whatever you do, don't try to teach your kids a language you don't speak with native ease. "The language of the home has to be a language you want to speak," warns Bialystok. "If you are imposing one that isn't comfortable for communication, you're making communication more complicated, because it is effortful." So forget about winging it with the French you learned in high school.
Parents of bilingual children must also devote significant amounts of time and money to nurture their kids' languages. In the Weschler household, bedtime stories came in two installments: first in English, from Dad; then in Polish, from Mom. Most bilingual families hire native-speaking nannies or enlist the aid of relatives from abroad. And casual language skills should, where possible, be reinforced at school or through private tutoring, so kids can formally learn the language's spelling, grammar, and cultural heritage.
Travel is another costly yet almost indispensable tool; nothing compares to immersion in a native-language environment. Turkish-born Ayse Birsel and her French-Senegalese husband, Bibi Seck, are raising their children in New York City to speak English, Turkish, and French. "Our older daughter's Turkish seems the most advanced," says Birsel. "That came about when she spent four weeks with my parents in Istanbul when she was 2—it was like a leap, as if that visit unlocked the Turkish side of her brain."
But the greatest obstacle to raising bilingual children in the U.S. may be cultural. In many parts of the world where different nationalities live side by side, multilingualism and learning languages at school are the norm. Here, English reigns supreme, and talking to children in a foreign tongue is far more the exception than the rule. "Raising multilingual kids in a culture that doesn't value multilingualism is tough," says Ayxa Calero-Breckheimer, a professor of clinical educational psychology at Columbia University who grew up in Puerto Rico, now lives in New Jersey, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on bilingualism.
Calero-Breckheimer's children learned German from their German-born father, Spanish from their mother and their nanny, and English at school. The family followed all the experts' rules and made sure that their boys, Adrian, 12, and Johannes, 10, heard only the same language consistently from each source. Yet they ran into the standard complications: The boys started putting together sentences late, and their vocabulary was split among the languages. They had difficulty with standardized tests, "because these tests don't seem to take into account bilingual or multilingual thought processes and performance," Calero-Breckheimer says.
For the parents, sticking to their respective languages required "patience, perseverance, and commitment," she recalls. "But the most important difficulty was the lack of understanding from teachers, educators, and physicians about this process." Calero-Breckheimer suggests that parents who want to go the bilingual route talk things over first with school principals, counselors, and teachers. "Bring them material to read, and if you have the means, invite experts to come and talk to them in school," she says.
Despite the challenges, it's nearly impossible to find parents who feel that teaching their children additional languages wasn't worthwhile. Sylvie Lambert Macdonald, a French-born artist and language teacher, raised three bilingual children in New Jersey with her American husband, Glen. When the kids reached middle-school age, she started to encounter resistance when she spoke to them in French. "It's hard when, for years, they answer in English," she says. "You ask yourself, 'Why am I bothering?'"
But Macdonald kept at it: She rented French movies, insisted on French schooling, and sent the children to Paris for annual vacations. Now her kids think being bilingual is cool. "They are proud that their mother is French," she says, "and that they can go to Europe every year and fit right in."
Can Monolinguals Raise Bilinguals?
Even if neither you nor your spouse is a native speaker of a second language, there are ways to offer your child the benefits of bilingualism.
•One logical choice is to employ a foreign-born nanny or babysitter who will speak to your child in her native tongue. In many cities, day-care centers with bilingual employees are also available.
•Consistency is important. Seeking out bilingual playgroups in your area can make regular practice a welcome ritual.
•If you're really serious, once your children are old enough, you can enroll them in an immersion school, where they will be spoken to mostly (or even solely) in the chosen language. This option often works well because, at this age, children learn as much from their peers as from their parents and teachers. If the school you prefer does not have an immersion program, there are also after-school options, which typically meet about three times a week.
•Detailed information on immersion programs, exchange programs, and bilingual playgroups and child care can be found at the Multilingual Children's Association's
website. The site features tips on getting started (and guidance for latecomers to a language), a classified section for locating resources in your hometown, and a high-traffic forum where parents trade stories and advice.
