When your children are mixed or in general if your parents were immigrants
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Anonymous
| My kids are mixed. Their dad’s family are immigrants. My kids never learned the language. Neither did their cousins. It’s fine. All of them are successful, happy American kids! |
Anonymous
I am mixed and my mom only spoke Spanish to me growing up. I had a speech delay and communicated through sign language until I was 2.5. The speech therapy I was in was in English. My mother continued speaking only Spanish to me and later my sister but because I only spoke English, my sister also only spoke English. We both understand a lot of Spanish and I think if we spent significant time in a Latin American country we would become fluent. I was also put in a Dual Language public preschool but I was bullied by the other children in the class so I moved to a non-DL school for kindergarten. Three years later the DL program ended so even if I had stayed it wouldn’t have done much good. My point is, a parent can speak only the foreign language and it still might not stick. IME it only works if BOTH parents only speak the foreign language 24/7, but if you want to enroll your child in private they will need to be fluent in English by age 4 or 5. I know people whose parents didn’t teach them English even though the parents themselves spoke English and most of them say that learning English in an ESL classroom made it harder to learn other subjects and found the program itself othering and traumatic. Learning an entire language on top of kindergarten academics can be very traumatic, especially if your ESL teachers are rude and upset that you are a slow learner. |
Anonymous
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I emigrated to the US as a ten year old, and am using the one-parent-one-language approach to teach my children our heritage language. DH, while supportive, speaks only English.
It started to feel like an uphill battle once the kids started school. They attend Saturday language school, watch no tv except in the heritage language, and I encourage them to speak it with each other, but it’s a struggle. Any tips from those who have done this successfully are welcome! |
Anonymous
Inhun? |
Anonymous
Nope. Times have changed. Many immigrants now want to keep their toes in the culture and language they've left behind. You can't extrapolate attitudes and practices from the 1940s to today. |
Anonymous
That's sad. |
Anonymous
No idea what that means, and google didn’t help much… |
Anonymous
As a counter example, I loved being able to speak a “secret” language that only me and my family spoke. Teaching my (3rd gen) child the foreign language now — he’s almost 3, and while it’s not as good as his English, he fully understands me and mostly speaks to me in the foreign language. His favorite cartoon (dubbed version of Caillou) is in the foreign language. When my parents visit, by the end of the week, he’s pretty much back to fully speaking in the foreign language. It can be done. I think there’s a lot of cope on this topic and I frequently feel a need to down play his language skills to others out of social politeness. |
Anonymous
This. My grandfather was a native German speaker but didn’t speak it at home after WWII. My dad was never fluent. I barely know any German. |
Anonymous
| A lot of German families here! My mom came from Germany as well, and my dad is American, but I was lucky to grow up with my German-speaking grandmother next door who spoke German with my mom a lot, so I consider myself fluent-ish. I do try to expose my kids to some aspects of German culture I loved as a kid (like now, we are listening to a lot of German Christmas songs.) My daughter knows some numbers, colors etc but that's it. I'm not a native speaker so it was never easy for me to speak German to my own kids, and I'm sure when they're grown their kids won't know any German at all but they might retain some of the songs and food aspects of the culture I imagine. |
Anonymous
Good luck to them. Their kids are in a new place and may even marry outside their culture and it just gets diluted. They don’t stay forever in insulated claustrophobic bubbles. |
Anonymous
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I immigrated to the US from a Spanish-speaking country as a young child. My parents spoke Spanish at home. I did go through a period where I would respond in English, but now I only speak to them in Spanish. Although I speak Spanish "fluently", I am definitely much more comfortable in English and am missing a lot of vocabulary in Spanish. There is a certain shame about it. I avoid saying things in Spanish that I don't know how to say. There is almost like an unspoken language barrier between me and my parents. These days a lot of Latinos call the kids that grow up here not speaking Spanish the "No sabo" kids (roughly translated as "I don't knows") which is I think is just awful. It is really, really hard to keep up a second language in the US even if both parents speak it, because your entire social life and schooling is in English.
My DH is from an Asian country, so we are a bicultural and biracial family. I knew from the start it would be hard to teach my kid Spanish, so we moved to an area with a dual language (Spanish) immersion school. I honestly haven't been super consistent with speaking Spanish at home. Having her in this school is motivating me to speak more Spanish with her, as she needs to understand Spanish to be successful in school. That being said I don't expect her to become fully bilingual, not even close. What I do appreciate is that she is interested in learning and enjoys it thanks to having it at school. That's the most important thing to me. I never want her to feel shame about her Spanish or feel she is deficient in some way (like I do). |
Anonymous
+1 I grew up speaking an obscure language as my parents are immigrants. But also consider myself a native English speaker it's my best and easiest language. I spoke the other language because it was our family default when I was young. That's very different from my having unilateral conversations with my kids and DH speaking to them in English. Obviously that's a fine approach but it's very different |
Anonymous
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When my kids were very little, I tried to speak to them in my parents' language. But, it was too hard to keep doing that because 1. I am not very good at speaking the language myself 2. there was no one around for me or them to speak it with. So, I dropped it.
Later, when they were older ES, I told them I was thinking of putting them into language school. They balked and resisted. So, I relented. They are now in HS/college, and we went to visit my parents' country for the first time, and they said they wished they knew how to speak the language. They want to go back there and be able to converse, even a little bit. They said they wished that I had pushed them more to send them to the language school. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. 
My older DC taught themselves a little bit using an online language app. They have been asking me questions about the language and how to say xyz.. If they learned the language, they would be a little bit trilingual because they can also speak another language they learned in school enough to get by. |
Anonymous
Why so secret the language |