Reply to Adoption--parental obligations regarding child's native language

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[quote=Anonymous]We struggle with this -- our daughter was 11 months old, so she wasn't speaking yet in her native language, and her first words were in English.

However, she clearly had a lot of receptive language, and for up to a year after that she would randomly come out with words in her native language that she definitely hadn't learned from us. (I learned ~50 words and would try to use them with her, but these were words I had to look up to identify.)

We tried language classes for 1-3 years olds when we first brought her home, and they were a disaster -- the first time we walked into the room, which was full of people of her ethnicity w/me the only white person, she began crying hysterically. (I think maybe she thought I was handing her off to another new family?) After several classes, she stopped crying hysterically, but she never completely relaxed. (Some of it was the teacher, who would back off for a while and then get right up in her face as soon as she started to feel comfortable.)

We tried (and failed) to get her into a language immersion school. Classes for older kids are about 90 minutes from our house (and geared toward kids living with at least one native speaker). I'm trying a language immersion camp this summer, and if that goes well I'm thinking of signing us both up for classes, together -- I think it would help me support her language acquisition, and I think also she's competitive enough that it might motivate her to learn.

We've visited her birth country once, about four years after she came home, and we hope to go again every four years. It was clear to me on our first trip that she would enjoy it a lot more if she spoke the language -- it wasn't strictly necessary, as we had someone around to translate whenever we were meeting people (her birth mom, her foster families, our relatives who live there), but she was very aware of (and uncomfortable with) not being able to communicate with these people who played a big part in her life.

I think it's something adoptive parents should do, and I definitely feel that I've dropped the ball with it -- but I also have to say I found it more challenging than I anticipated.[/quote]

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