Parents who want to bring up their kids to speak the family languages can learn a lot from those families who have been successful at bringing up bilingual children. However, I also think that a great deal can be learnt from parents whose children grew up not becoming fluent in the family’s minority language. It is equally […]

As parents most of us have an ideal picture of what we want our children to be like when they grow up. Some of us are more specific than others with regards to the personality traits and behaviours we wish for our children, but for most of us ‘happy’, ‘honest’ and ‘confident’ feature high on […]

Due to the nature of my work, I spend a lot of time on-line: researching, reading blogs and comments, finding articles to feature in my newsletter and looking for experts and parents to share their stories. Inevitably, I spend quite a lot of my on-line time on social media, mainly on Facebook, and in different […]

Question I would like to ask about trilingualism. I’m Italian, my partner Japanese and we live in NYC where we have a 2-month-old daughter. I speak Italian to her and my wife speaks Japanese. Our common language is English because she knows no Italian and I speak no Japanese. We want to speak our native […]

The third part in my series on teaching your child a non-native language is all about different language-learning activities that you can do with your kid. So far in the series I have written about the things you need to take into consideration before embarking on such a journey and which family language strategy you […]

Question Hello, I would like to ask a coach a question. I am Argentinean, my first language is Spanish, English and French. I am now living in Montreal and my husband is French Canadian. He speaks French most of the time at home. He has a daughter who stays with us 50% of the time […]

After taking into consideration all the points raised in the first part of this series, you have decided that you want to give your child the gift of another language. My presumption is that you have discussed this with the rest of the family and everybody agrees that it is a good idea. (If you […]

One of the most common questions we get to our panel of Family Language Coaches is from parents thinking about teaching their child a language of which the mother and/or father is not a native speaker, and whether this is a good idea. My short answer to this question is, “Yes, I think it can […]

When you are raising your child to speak more than one language, it is important to know how to go about it – this is the raison d’être of my blog! It is however equally important to be aware of the things you should avoid when bringing up a bilingual child. Generally, I am a […]

Question My wife and I are having a baby, we are truly excited but we are scared about the language in how to educate our child. We are of different nationalities, Portuguese and Russian, we live in Germany (since one year) and our common language is English (our German language is still developing).’ We have […]