WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF BILINGUALISM?

Giving your child an extra language is a gift for a lifetime! And good? What exactly is the gift you are giving your child? What advantages in life will your child benefit from and are they worth his effort? Build your own opinion by browsing through the pros and cons facts below. I’ll start by sharing with you the most important advantages based on the latest research findings, as well as the experience of hundreds of parents and their bilingual children.

Exposure to another culture:

Learning another language has been shown to improve cultural understanding. Being able to talk with people from different countries and cultures exposes the child to different ways of thinking, different attitudes, habits and points of view. It also opens new doors. As a result, children soon learn that there is more than one way to do everything.

Build bridges to new relationships:

Communication is a fundamental part of human relationships, and while young children certainly find and use many forms of nonverbal communication to interact and play with each other, language is a key enabler of new friendships. Speaking the language of those around you is the bridge to connect with them.

Possible Financial/Career Benefits:

Many professions today require mastery of a second or third language and those who are fluent in them certainly have an advantage over those who are not.

More flexible and divergent thinking:

Many studies have been carried out to determine the impact of bilingual education on thinking abilities and the interesting result is that bilingual children think more flexibly. One explanation is that these children learn early that there is more than one word for each concept, remaining open to the possibility.

Self-identity as a linguistic or cultural bridge:

Bilingual children not only act as a linguistic or cultural bridge, they also be very aware of your special gift. This awareness is transferred to their own image and becomes part of their own identity, part of how they see themselves and how they define who they are.

Increased self-esteem and self-confidence:

Knowing more than one language helps your child easily adapt to different language environments, which increases his self-esteem and self-confidence.

Of course there are many more advantages. Parents report that their children are learning a third and fourth language more easily, particularly when the new language shares a similar alphabet or language structure. Research has also shown that bilinguals develop superior reading and writing skills.

Looking through the entire list, there isn’t a single most important advantage. Different people will judge them differently. However, the combination of all of them points to THE most important advantage overall: becoming bilingual involves the whole childnot just your language:

Becoming bilingual defines a child’s identity, their sense of security and status, their self-esteem and self-image, and increases a child’s self-confidence.

ARE THERE DISADVANTAGES?

This article would not be complete without pointing out the few potential trade-offs you are about to make as you begin your family’s bilingual/multilingual journey. But as you will see, these are quite minor compared to the list of advantages – some people wouldn’t even call them cons.

Your child could start talking 3 to 6 months later

You can expect your bilingual child to start speaking 3-6 months later than their monolingual peers. Monolingual children are expected to say their first 8-10 words around 18 months and their first 2-word sentences around 2 years. So you do the math. If your child doesn’t start talking even after the extra 3 to 6 months, it’s time to see a specialist and possibly have your child’s hearing checked. Many children’s delayed speech development is the result of hearing problems caused by infection, harmful noise levels, or trauma, even if the hearing test did not show defects at birth (see the appendix for a checklist of language development milestones).

Your child could temporarily mix languages

It is normal for bilingual or multilingual children to mix languages ​​until about 4 years of age. If the children are missing the correct word in language A, they will borrow it from language B to communicate their message. There is nothing to worry about and no action to take until that age. However, as parents, we must be completely consistent and avoid creating sentences that start in one language and end in another language. We act as role models for our children. If parents mix languages, children will too, and well beyond the age of 4.

Your child will face an additional academic load: reading/writing

If you want your children to not only speak another language, but also read and write in it, you will need to provide additional tuition beyond the normal school day. Only a few schools offer this as part of the normal curriculum. Of course, you can decide to teach your child yourself. Whichever way you choose, for a minimum of 9-12 months your child will need to study an additional 1-2 hours per week to acquire the additional skills to read and write in a second language.

It will require extra effort from YOU, the parents.

Raising your child with a second (third, etc.) language is a gift and commitment on your part. Unlike a ceramics or art class that you can participate in for a couple of months, the decision to raise bilingual children is a commitment of a few years. It requires you to constantly work to provide language opportunities for your children, spending time, money, creativity, and constantly arranging and rearranging your children’s language exposure.

The last point is really the biggest and most important fact to keep in mind. Engaged to raising your children with more than one language will cost you extra effort and can sometimes seem like a big burden.

Deciding against bilingualism, however, is always embarrassing, particularly when it means for one parent that their children will lose connection to one parent’s heritage and culture. One of the participants in my workshop was about to cry because her daughter did not speak her language. “I felt like she wasn’t really my daughter, like she wasn’t ‘mine’.

Knowing that thousands of parents before you have gone down the same path will certainly make you join their final judgement:

“The benefits are well worth the effort!”

If you’ve come to the same conclusion, check out more information in the eBook. “Make Your Child Multilingual! – The 10-Step Success Plan for Raising Bilingual/Multilingual Children” of the Multilingual Network.