The #1 Language Ingredient For Raising Multilingual Children

As parents of multilingual children, we are often plagued by a myriad of concerns, especially when it comes to our multilingual children speaking.  We wonder if our children’s speech delay has anything to do with us raising them multilingually.  We worry about our multilingual children mixing their languages.  We fret when our children all of a sudden decide to stop speaking our language.  Each of these concerns is valid and something we need to work through for ourselves so that we can stay on track with confidence!

Yet with all of this worry around our children’s speech, we often forget the most important element in raising multilingual children.  We take for granted the one ingredient which has probably the most impact on whether or not our children will become multilingual!

What is this magical element? Drum roll please…

This magical element is: Listening.

As most of us have experienced, it is very difficult to learn a language if we never hear it spoken.  As a case in point: I studied Ancient History in college (I wanted to be a Mediterranean Archaeologist).  A large part of my four years of study was spent dedicated to learning Ancient Greek and Latin (languages which I truly enjoyed learning).  Five days a week I had classes in those languages and hours of homework each night.  On top of that, I was practicing reading French and Italian, as we were expected to be able to read research materials in those languages.  After a few years of this, I finally proclaimed myself a language-learning failure when I just couldn’t seem to retain vocabulary in any of those languages.  Then I met my German husband-to-be and after spending a year in Germany, I was attending classes at his university in German!

You already know what the magic elixir was: Listening!

I was surrounded by German-speakers day in and day out.  Their words were penetrating me and I was soaking it all up like a sponge.  I remember falling asleep at night with specific sentence constructs rolling around in my head (Es gibt viele Gründe dafür… that one rolled around in my head for weeks!).  Listening and retaining, listening and retaining.

Television shows were in German, the radio was in German (even many of the songs), books were in German, signs were in German.  Everywhere I looked or listened, it was German and all of that went into me day after day, week after week, month after month.

Multilingual children need to hear their second language spoken often, even if you don’t hear them using the language themselves.  They need to hear it spoken in context and they need to hear it spoken by as many people as possible.  You need to be this language gateway by speaking it yourself, putting on music in the language, finding DVDs and online videos in the language and surrounding your child with books in the language.

So if today you find that you are fretting over something in particular about your multilingual parenting journey, stop and take a deep breath.  All you have to do today is to speak your language.  That’s it!  If you do that, you will have covered the most important ingredient of all! Just start babbling away – even if it is about the weather or the cake you are baking or how fascinating the vacuum is when it sucks up those fur balls.  Isn’t that great!?  We don’t have to spend a lot of time worrying about whether we are talking about the right things with our multilingual children and we definitely don’t need to think about teaching our children grammar or sentence structures!  Not today.  Today you just talk and surround your child’s world with your language.  We can make it more structured if and when we want to, but save that for another day.

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