For expat parents,passing on their native languages can be a struggle.Not sharing your first language with loved ones is hard.Not passing it on to your own child can be especially tough.Many expat and immigrant parents feel a sense of failure;they wring their hands and share stories on parenting forums and social media,hoping to find the secret to nurturing bilingual children successfully.
Children are linguistic sponges,but this doesn't mean that cursory exposure is enough.They must hear a language quite a bit to understand it-and use it often to be able to speak it comfortably.This is mental work,and a child who doesn't have a motive to speak a language either a need or a strong desire-will often avoid it. Children's brains are already busy enough.
So languages often wither and die when parents move abroad.Consider America.The foreign-born share of the population is 13.7%,and has never been lower than 4.7%(in 1970).And yet foreign language speakers don't accumulate: today just 25% of the population speaks another language.That's because, typically,the first generation born in America is bilingual,and the second is monolingual-in English,the children often struggling to speak easily with their immigrant grandparents.
In the past,governments discouraged immigrant families from keeping their languages.Teddy Roosevelt worried that America would become a "polyglot boarding-house".These days,officials tend to be less interventionist;some even see a valuable resource in immigrants' language abilities.Yet many factors conspire to ensure that children still lose their parents' languages,or never learn them.
A big one is institutional pressure.A child's time spent with a second language is time not spent on their first.So teachers often discourage parents from speaking their languages to their children.(This is especially true if the second language lacks prestige.)Parents often reluctantly comply,worried about their offspring's education.This is a shame;children really can master two languages or even more.Research does indeed suggest their vocabulary in each language may be somewhat smaller for a while.But other studies hint at cognitive advantages among bilinguals.They may be more adept at complex tasks,better at maintaining attention,and (at the other end of life)suffer the onset of dementia later.
Languages are an intimate part of identity; it is wrenching to try and fail to pass them on to a child.Success may be a question of remembering that they are not just another thing to be drilled into a young mind,but a mnatter of the heart.
Many immigrant parents feel a sense of failure because________.