Raising a bilingual family? Or dreaming of it? Whether you are an expat or not, in a mixed-culture relationship or not, it is possible to raise your child in two (or more) languages, and the benefits you will pass on to your child are significant. But how do you go about it?
On Raising a Bilingual Family, an episode from our archives, we sit down with British mum Kristie Prada, author and creator of the blog Mamma Prada. She and her Italian husband live in the UK and are serious about raising their children to speak both languages flawlessly. In her effort to do just that, she has become an expert on childhood bilingualism, and shares that knowledge onto her blog.
On this episode, Kristie shares her favorite resources for raising children in two languages, the most interesting of which is the double-language book series by One Third Stories. She also shares the brilliant idea of teaching your child about the other country and its culture as a way of piquing his or her interest in the language (instead of the other way around), and offers tips and tricks for staying strong when your older child resists the minority language.
If bilingualism is something you want for your child, this is the episode for you!
This episode also features a bonus appearance by none other than Tiffany’s son Aurelio, who offers a peek into the mind of a bilingual toddler, and answers Katy’s hard-hitting questions, such as, “What does a cow say?”
The Bittersweet Life podcast has been on the air for an impressive 10+ years! In order to help newer listeners discover some of our earlier episodes, every Friday we are now airing an episode from our vast archives! Enjoy!
You can listen right here, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.
Related Episodes:
[THE BITTERSWEET PAST] Living Life in a Foreign Language
Episode 518: The Limitations of Language
Episode 430: Does Language Shape Thinking?
Episode 379: Can You Truly Be Bilingual?
Episode 217: BILINGUAL (with Kristie Prada)
Bittersweet Moment #54: Learning to Read in Two Languages at Once
Bittersweet Moment #3: LANGUAGE
Five key takeaways from the episode:
- The podcast discusses raising bilingual children, featuring Tiffany Parks who is raising her son Aurelio to speak both English and Italian in Rome.
- Kristie Prada, who runs a blog about raising bilingual children, shares her experience raising two bilingual kids in London and offers advice for parents.
- The “one parent, one language” method is recommended, where each parent consistently speaks their native language to the child.
- Consistency, starting early, and creating a need for the child to use both languages are important factors in successful bilingual upbringing.
- Common challenges include lack of family support, children favoring the community language as they get older, and parents getting discouraged if they don’t see immediate results.
Full Episode Transcript:
Katy
Welcome to Rome. This is The Bittersweet Life with Katy Sewall and Tiffany Parks. Say hi. Hi, Aurelio.
Aurelio
Hi.
Katy
Can you hear yourself?
Aurelio
Yeah.
Katy
What do you sound like?
Aurelio
Fine.
Tiffany
He sounds cute.
Aurelio
Hi.
Katy
So what does a cow say? And what does the car. What does a car say? What does a motorcycle say? How does a motorcycle sound when it goes up a hill? What does Santa say? Merry Christmas. Yes. So tell me about your mom. What does your mom like? She’s like an owlette.
Aurelio
Yeah?
Katy
Yeah. Is she a good singer?
Aurelio
Yeah.
Katy
What does she sing?
Aurelio
Good boy. Good boy.
Katy
Can you sing it for us?
Aurelio
Yeah.Okay.
Aurelio
Gattoboy, gattoboy, gattoboy, gattoboy…
Katy
Hello. This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Aurelio
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
You’re not Tiffany Parks. Who are you?
Aurelio
Aurelio.
Katy
Aurelio. And who’s Aurelio, Tiffany Parks.
Tiffany
Aurelio is my son.
Katy
And today we are in Rome at Tiffany’s apartment, and we are talking about bilingual children.
Tiffany
Yeah. Of which Aurelio is one.
Katy
All right, so we’re going to be joined by some other special guests in an exploration of what it is to raise and be a bilingual child.
Tiffany
Now, you just said that in Italian. Can you say it in English?
Aurelio
Hammer. Si, hammer.
Tiffany
No, he didn’t say hammer in Italian. Sometimes when I ask him to say a word, like if he’s just said a word in Italian, this is some weird thing he’s just started to do. And I say, can you say it in English? And he just says hammer.
Katy
I don’t know why hammer’s the go to the go to word. We have Aurelio here where he’s joining us just to give us some examples of how great his Italian is compared to mine. Of course, he is a child being raised by an American mother and an Italian father. And we’ve talked about it a little bit before, but it seems from me staying with you guys that you flow kind of back and forth between Italian and English, but mostly talk to him in English.
Tiffany
Yeah, to him, I talk. I would say 99% in English. If I say something in Italian, it’s either an accident or I might be with someone who doesn’t speak English. And I want to make a joke. You know how sometimes I might say something to Aurelio, but I’m really saying it because I want the other person with me to, like, laugh or something? In that case, I might say something in Italian just for the benefit of the person that I’m with. But that’s Very, very rare. I don’t actually talk to him in Italian. Even if I’m with a bunch of Italians, I’ll still talk to him in English.
Katy
So, Aurelio, what language does your mother speak?
Aurelio
Candles.
Tiffany
Candles.
Katy
She speaks candles. How do you speak candles? Give me an example.
Tiffany
Let’s just say for anyone who doesn’t know, Aurelio is only two and a half. So we say he speaks Italian and he does. But he’s not really the type of person who we can interview and have answer question coherently. Also because he’s over excited because Katy’s here and he loves Katy and so he’s acting up a little bit.
Katy
Yes, he was my wake up committee. This morning I hear Tiffany in the hallway saying, don’t go wake her up. Don’t go wake her up. Sliding door opens and then he comes.
Tiffany
He also, like all kids, doesn’t like to be put on the spot. So he’ll talk up a storm and then I’ll get the camera out or the microphone and he’ll clam up. Right?
Aurelio
Yeah.
Katy
When it comes to his development, did you find that one of the two languages came out first?
Tiffany
I think he started speaking like when he first started saying words. I think it was about 50, 50. Now he does favor Italian. If he’s going to say a full sentence, he’ll most likely do it in Italian. And so I have to, depending on how much time we have. A really. You need to get down. You need to get down. Honey, come over here. Papa has to go. Speaking in two languages at the same time. He says, I also want to go, but go he’s doing in English. So that’s a very common thing for him, that he’ll speak two different languages in the same sentence. Sometimes he’ll go back and forth like two or three times between the languages in the same sentence, which is questo light voyo off or something like that. So, Katy, I noticed that you’re not very up on your truck and vehicle names.
Katy
Yeah, it’s because I don’t have any children.
Tiffany
Yeah, you called a trash truck a dump truck. And I really took offense to that.
Katy
Yes, he did.
Tiffany
So maybe, maybe Aurelio, you could describe some of these trucks.
Aurelio
What is this?
Tiffany
What is that?
Aurelio
It’s a motorcycle.
Tiffany
And how do you say that? It’s a police motorcycle. Now how do you say motorcycle in Italian? That’s right. And what about this? What kind of truck is that?
Aurelio
The pickup truck.
Tiffany
You know what, I don’t even know what that’s called in Italian. So I Don’t think you. Do.
Katy
You know what it’s called in Italian?
Aurelio
A truck.
Tiffany
How do you say truck in Italian? That’s right. What about this? What’s this?
Aurelio
It’s a police car.
Tiffany
But what if I were Italian and I couldn’t understand what police car was?
Tiffany
How would you call it? Machina. That’s right. That’s right. Sound effects are the same. They’re universal.
Katy
We were just remarking a black. If anybody knows the answer is why boys come out being able to do sound effects, I would really like to know. Yeah, it’s been a real detriment to my radio career.
Tiffany
I worried when he was littler that he would be confused. He would hear these words in English and he would hear words in Italian, and he would not realize that they were two different languages. And he would just use them interchangeably. He does use them interchangeably, but. But he knows that they’re two languages. Because when I ask him, well, can you say that in Italian or in English? I usually ask him to translate into English. Yeah, I did it. How do you say I did it in Italian?
Aurelio
English.
Tiffany
Yeah, I did. It is English. How do you say it in Italian?
Katy
I need to know how to say it in Italian.
Tiffany
Bless you.
Aurelio
Bless you.
Tiffany
How do you say bless you in Italian?
Aurelio
Saluta vello. Mama.
Tiffany
Can you say I did it in Italian? That’s right. Good job, honey.
Katy
I feel from just being around him for the last few days that having him sort of putting the tube back to back has actually helped me learn certain words in Italian. Do you think that that helped Claudio? Claudio’s been studying English for a long time. But having a kid that’s flowing back and forth so much.
Tiffany
I think so. I think so. I think I speak a lot more. I mean, I know I speak a lot more English in the home because before Aurelio came along, I didn’t really speak English when we were at home. Like, he only heard it when I was either on the phone or if my family was in town or I was with a friend. Now I speak it all the time in the house to Aurelio, and sometimes I speak it to Claudio, too. Okay, I’m gonna speak English to you because you understand it and you can just answer in Italian if you want, or you can answer in English. And that’s my fault because I should be doing that. And I. You know, we’ve talked about it before. It’s. You get used to speaking a certain language with someone, and it’s hard to. To speak a different One, but. But he definitely hears way more English now than he ever used to.
Katy
Yeah. People seem to think that it’s sort of a challenge to raise bilingual children. Is that true, would you say? You know, where does that perception come from that it’s challenging?
Tiffany
I bet it is challenging. I’m not that far into it yet. I mean, I’m only two and a half years in, so we’re going to see.
Katy
You think when he becomes, like, a disgruntled teenager, it’s going to be harder?
Tiffany
I do. I think that as they get older, you know, they get more independent and they get how they have more precise ideas about which language they want to speak. And usually it’s the language of the place they’re living, because that’s the language they’re going to school in, and that’s the language they speak with their friends. So the majority of their time, whatever moms and dads speak at home, I just want to drill into his head that English is the language he speaks with Mom. And if he talks to me in Italian, I would like to say 100% of the time, but it’s not true, because sometimes I’m in a hurry, and sometimes I just want to get him to eat his dinner, you know? But I try when he speaks to me in Italian to say, can you say it in English? Or sometimes if I’m really feeling mean, I’ll say, you know, I don’t understand what you’re saying. You have to say it in English. And I want to get to the point that he doesn’t even ever speak Italian to me, because it doesn’t. It feels weird. So that’s what I would like to get to. I think that when you don’t do that and you just kind of let it slide when they’re little, they don’t develop that sense of, oh, Mom, English, English, Mom. And then they get a little older, they get ideas of their own, and they don’t want to speak English right now. He’s open to both, and he’ll speak both if I tell him to, but he’s still little, so I think that that might be it.
Katy
Interesting.
Tiffany
Aurelio, are you an American boy or are you an Italian boy?
Aurelio
Italian boy.
Tiffany
Italian boy. You’re not an American boy. He’s being. He’s being a toddler right now.
Katy
We’ll be talking to Mama Prada to hear what she has to say.
Tiffany
Yes, she is an Italian woman living and raising a family in the U.K.
Katy
All right, so let’s go. Aurelia, do you want to say goodbye?
Aurelio
Goodbye.
Katy
You want to say goodbye in Italian.
Aurelio
No.
Tiffany
All right.
Katy
Joining me from London is Kristie Prada. She’s married to an Italian. She’s got two kids. She’s navigating the cross cultural life that we talk about so much on this show. And she writes at www.mamaprada.com. It’s a resource for raising bilingual children, Italian culture and lifestyle. Thanks for joining me.
Kristie Prada
Thank you for having me.
Katy
Do you want to tell us a little bit about your background and how you end up being interested in the idea of raising bilingual children?
Kristie Prada
Well, I think the moment you start dating somebody that’s a different nationality to you, it’s sort of comes up, doesn’t it? But. So I’m married to an Italian and I’m English. But when we were literally about to have our first child, we spoke to some friends of ours and they were. The husband was half Dutch, half Spanish. The wife was half Spanish, half German. And their daughter was being raised in Barcelona. So she spoke Catalan at school and then she was learning English at school as well as their kind of second language, you know, and it kind of really opened up our eyes to what is actually possible. And then learning languages as an adult, as you probably know, is far more difficult. So we thought, what if we could give our children this sort of gift really, as we see it, learning from birth. So we put our heads together and read a ton of books and talked to people and started doing it ourselves, really. So Mama Prada was set up really a year ago to try and share some of that information because we’ve realized we get asked quite a lot of questions and sometimes people give up too early when they shouldn’t. And it’s hard to know really because it’s a long haul thing. It’s not something that you see immediate results with.
Katy
Yeah. So how old are your two kids?
Kristie Prada
Six and two and a half.
Katy
And how is it going?
Kristie Prada
It’s going well, but there are definitely stages where it’s really challenging. I think my first child, my son, he went through a stage because we live in London. He goes to an English school, he went to English nursery. I’m a stay at home mum and I’m the English one. So obviously the minority language is Italian and it’s more effort for him to speak Italian. We had a stage around age 4 where he suddenly started to realize, hey, all my friends have got English dads, why can’t I have one? Sort of thing we had to sort of explain. It doesn’t really work like that, you know, and you shouldn’t really reject the language based on that. But I think it’s identity starts to come out at that age and they want to be like their peers. And so that’s the age that we’ve found that you start to hit a bit of a challenge. You can explain to an older child, oh, but you could work abroad or you could talk to your grandparents when you visit them, or you could do this or that, but you can’t explain that to a four year old, really. They don’t care. So that’s the age where you start to hit a few challenges and you have to sort of keep the faith and be consistent. And that has now worked for us.
Katy
One of the things that Tiffany does is with her husband Claudio, because they’re in a similar situation. She’s the English speaker, he’s the Italian, but Tiffany tries to only speak to him in English. Now, is that a strategy that you do as well? Does your husband only speak to your kids in Italian?
Kristie Prada
Yeah, so that’s what we’ve done. It’s called opol. It’s one parent, one language. We thought at the start that would be our best option. And I think it definitely was, especially with the beginning when they’re really tiny, they’re not yet in school and things like that. You want to get sort of a 50, 50 experience exposure to the language if you can. And children really like to have that structure and like a little rule. And if they know that that’s what they do with each parent, they tend to stick to it. Even to the extent where now if I say to my son, oh, you know, tonight we’re going to speak Italian, he’s like, no, we’re not, mama. That’s not what we do, you know, because he’s just used to it being in that way. And they’re really comfortable with it. Even my two and a half year old now will kind of translate my husband talking in Italian to me in English, even though I understand. So they really understand that every object has two names for it and it’s just a normal thing for them. So I think it can seem like quite an overwhelming thing to do, but actually it quickly becomes normal life.
Katy
And has it altered the way that you and your husband actually can engage with each other?
Kristie Prada
Yeah, I haven’t thought about it in that way, actually. I think I always felt that because our community language was English and I spent the most time with the children because he was at work, that I really needed to support the Italian side. So I don’t talk to the children in Italian, but I use resources when he’s not around to help them. So if you’ve got children that are really resistant, obviously things like learning apps and Disney films and things like that, where you can get quite a lot of language options in them, are great at first, but obviously reading books or taking them to playgroups, you know, anything where they might encounter other children that speak the same language, or even just other children that have a mixed identity nationality as well, that can make them realize, hang on, it’s quite normal to have one parent from one place and one from another. They start to come home and say, oh, did you know my friend Sarah, her mum is from here and her dad is from here. And they start to realize that it’s not that weird, totally normal. And then they’re actually more open to learning your two languages.
Katy
How do you find those parents of mixed nationalities?
Kristie Prada
You get creative. So when they were at nursery, I would check out or ask the nursery staff which children spoke had Italian at home as well. And then I would ask them to put a little card that I’d written in their bags and just saying like, hi, we’re a mixed Italian English family. If you fancy, like a playdate at the park or something, let me know. I’ve only had one family say no so far. Most people, they want to do that, but they don’t know how to go about it. And I found that actually creating a need in your child to want to learn. So it’s all right for us to say, oh, but when you’re older, you will so appreciate that we did this, you know, but children don’t really care about that sort of thing, you know, but for my son especially, being able to communicate with a child that he wants to play with was really important to him and so that made him want to speak Italian and then he had a desire. And once you have that motivation, it’s much more easy to teach them.
Katy
Is it possible to raise a child bilingual if both parents speak the same language? Have you explored that at all?
Kristie Prada
I haven’t met people trying to do that yet, but I think you have to think about as well what it is you’re trying to do. What level of fluency do you want? Because bilingual technically means that you can converse and understand and be understood. 50%? 50. 50 in each language and you have literally no accent at all. It’s quite unusual for anyone to get to that stage. Often you will have a slight accent because you lived in one country longer than another or something. And if we really think about it, how many of us really care that much about that level? You normally, what you want is that your children can mix with the family from both sides, that they could maybe work there if they wanted to, that they can be understood enough, even if they have a slight accent, that they can get by and manage themselves and live in that country. So to do that is totally possible. It’s harder to become completely bilingual and it will obviously be harder if both parents don’t speak that language. But you know, you have to probably choose how you’re going to set up your learning. So my next point would be, what is the makeup of your family? Think about how much exposure and try and calculate, if you can, how much exposure your child gets to the language you want them to learn. So when we first started, my husband was working till 7 each night. You know, we worked out in the week. They get an hour of his time, maybe every night before bed when they were small and then a weekend. That’s not really enough to be completely bilingual. That’s enough to be able to get by and have great holidays and chat to all your family when you’re there. So if you can’t get to a higher exposure, then you have to think about other ways to do it. And that is why I have then supplemented the Italian through resources when I’m at home, so that we can manage to get to a sort of a higher level of fluency.
Katy
Interesting. And have you ever considered putting them into a fully Italian language school?
Kristie Prada
We have, but it’s quite rare in the uk, unfortunately. You get French classes and Spanish classes, even Polish classes. But yeah, Italian language schools are quite hard to find here, unfortunately. Otherwise we would definitely have done a Saturday school or something like that.
Katy
Yeah. So what other advice would you give for starting out or if, if a parent has a brand new baby, or in Tiffany’s case, a two and a half year old and is just sort of starting.
Kristie Prada
Yeah, just start. I think a lot of people put it off and they’re not really sure the right time to start, but just start, start straight away. I would say even if you know you’re pregnant now and wondering about it, just get together with your partner and make a decision that you’re both really committed to do it and then try and stick to it. So consistency is quite key. So we decided we’re going to use one parent, one language as our method and we’ve stuck to that. You can they say change method, for example, now that both of our children speak pretty good Italian and English, it’s possible we could switch to minority language at home, so we’d only speak Italian all the time at home. But I probably wouldn’t keep changing method because you don’t want to confuse them, if you see what I mean. I think consistency is really key. And don’t think that you can’t start from birth because you can. Even little babies, people said, oh, my mother in law says the baby won’t understand any words until they’re two, so there’s no point. But actually when you go to pick a baby up and you say up you come. For example, if you say the same in Italian, your baby will tense its little neck and get ready to be picked up by either parent. It doesn’t matter which language it is, they know what’s about to happen. So it is important to just start straight away and not worry about it.
Katy
Some of your early blog posts, when you first started writing about this, you were talking about different games and ways to get kids involved in it, even just in their sort of passing day to day life.
Kristie Prada
Yes. Yeah, we use a lot of. So a lot of people think you need to buy, you know, an extensive amount of expensive toys with noises. And it’s great to have these as extras, but you don’t need to have them. And one of the things that we do that every night my husband puts a word of the day on the front door. So when the children get up, they see this word and they pick it up and we chat about what it is over breakfast. And he literally will come up with these if we, you know, we pop out to a zoo, for example, and he suddenly realizes, oh, I haven’t done animals yet. So one night he’ll write a load and then we just put one out every day. And that costs you nothing. We worked out the other day that we’ve now given an extra 400 words to their vocabulary through doing this. Now clearly not all of them will be remembered to the same extent and some you will have to go over, but that’s a really easy way. That actually is not very time consuming either where you can add these things in. The other kind of traditional but always good idea is to read to them at bedtime. So if I read a bedtime story, I read in English and my husband reads, we read in Italian, you can now get excellent bilingual books. For example, there’s a company called One Third Stories and they are really for parents that even if the parent doesn’t speak a second language at all, you can read this book with your child and it has an audio CD that comes with it so it can teach you pronunciation. It starts in one language, the story, and as it goes through the story, little words from the second language are interspersed at moments that you would definitely know that you know, instead of cup, you’ve used tatsa, for example, things like that. So the child ends up that by the end that they’ve got to the end of the book, it’s all in Italian or French or Spanish, and the beginning of the book is in English. So there are ways you can do it where even if you wanted to go on holiday to France in the summer and you didn’t know any French, you could help your child pick up some French, if you see what I mean. So books always good audio CDs to have at home or in the car. Car journeys are great. Sometimes. If my children want to watch a film, I say to them, well, you can, but you’ve got to watch it in Italian, you know, so just little ways that you can slip it in without them realizing. Having International Radio 1 at home, things like board games, you know, we quite often play Scrabble, but we don’t use the Scrabble rules at all. We say to them, right, let’s make up some Italian wor. And we play that way. And they can be as creative as they want to, depending on what words they’re learning at the time. So you can intersperse it into normal life and you can do it with things that you already have around you.
Katy
Do you know how long you need to be consistent before they sort of have it? Is there like an age where you could dial it way back?
Kristie Prada
Well, I’d say if you start from birth around four is when you see sort of fluency. Some children literally won’t speak the language, the second language, at all until four. I know some families where both of their parents are, say, Italian. They live in London, they’ve been talking only Italian at home for four years, and their children suddenly start talking Italian back to them at 4. And they’ve understood everything up until that point, but they’ve always responded in English because that’s all they’re hearing in their community sort of thing. So that’s why it’s very easy to get disheartened, because you might sometimes feel like, oh, is it going in? Is it working? You know, but the understanding is usually there. It’s just that they’re slow on actually responding back to you in the second language or third language. So I would say four to fluency. But obviously all Children learn at different rates. You have to be patient. But, yeah, I’ve noticed lots of children do this thing called code switching, which is when you start mixing a sentence made up of words from both languages. My daughter has been doing that since she hit two. We’ve been having mixes of Italian and English in one sentence. Gradually, she will start to separate them completely into two languages. She’s already starting to do it a bit now. She’s definitely ahead of her brother. Is it because she’s a girl? Is it because she’s the second child? You know, you just can’t tell, can you? Everybody does it at different rates, so we’ll see.
Katy
Do you find that there is a delay in talking overall when you’re doing two different languages?
Kristie Prada
No, we haven’t. I know there’s. People say that it’s a myth, but I know that some people probably do experience it. It doesn’t feel like that for them. But children generally speak at different rates anyway. You know, you get some children that don’t speak until they’re one and a half, two, not barely any words at all. And often that gets confused with the fact that they’re learning two languages. Usually. Bilingualism is not actually the culprit in that. Normally it’s just the fact that the child is taking longer to process everything and learn and get the confidence, actually want to speak as well. Because especially I found with my son, he was much less interested in having long conversations with anybody about things. He just wanted to be physical and play. Whereas my daughter’s much more interested in communicating and sitting down with you and getting information out of you and telling you everything at 100 miles an hour. So I think if you had a child that did seem to be having a speech delay, go and see somebody about it, but always get a second opinion. Usually you need a speech therapist that specializes in bilingualism as well, and they can tell you if that is definitely the issue or if it’s just. It’s a general development thing and that your child is just speaking a little bit later.
Katy
Is there anything that you’ve tried or heard about in your research that universally doesn’t work?
Kristie Prada
Not something that sort of universally didn’t work. But I found that there’s lots of quite elaborate toys usually that have all singing and dancing buttons and all sorts of things like that. And I think, well, meaning grandparents kind of go and buy all these and actually, I don’t think much goes in from using them, all of these extra resources. You have to think about whether they’re Interactive or not. So reading a book and asking your child to listen and then talk back to you, that is something that would definitely increase their speaking and confidence and their listening ability. But pressing a lot of buttons on a toy, it doesn’t really help their cognitive development, if you see what I mean. Probably they enjoy it generally as a child because it’s fun, there’s lights and that sort of thing. But I would generally warn people off buying too many of these new things and stick to books, audio and as much interaction themselves as possible. Even like Skype calls with relatives, even if it’s not the case of that one of you is from a different country and you want your child to learn that language. It might be that you’re both from the uk, but you really want your child to learn French. One of the best things you can do is teach your child about France. Often we are so obsessed with trying to make our children learn the words, we forget what is that country about, what happens there, you know, why are they not interested in learning it? Whereas if you start looking at what are the festivals that happen in France, what do people eat there, what are the main sites that are quite interesting, and you start showing them maybe a YouTube video, or you cook a meal together, or you say, hey, this party this weekend, and this is what they do, then children get interested and then they think, hey, I wouldn’t mind learning French. So sometimes you have to sort of think away from the language to get the interest there.
Katy
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Well, is there anything else that you really want to add before we let you go?
Kristie Prada
Well, I’d say one thing maybe too. One of the biggest hurdles that I see people facing is lack of support from extended family. So you could have really well meaning relatives, but they don’t really understand what you’re trying to do, why it’s important to you. Often they will have all sorts of myths about that your child will not be able to speak properly or be less intelligent or it won’t be useful. Or that in your country, especially like in England, for example, languages are not that valued in comparison to the rest of Europe. But try not to be swayed by these thoughts if that’s what you really want to do. I’m actually coming up with a kind of a set of different documents to help bilingual parents at the moment, and one of them will be on the myths and dispelling the myths around bilingualism. Because one of the things I do get a lot is people saying, you know, I wanted to do it, but my mother in law thought this and my father in law something else, you know, and you do need that support around you because it is for the long haul. And sometimes if you can explain those things and show them, hey, an actual, you know, person in a white coat said that this isn’t true at all. They believe them more than they believe you. So, yeah, that sort of thing. I think as a couple, be on the same page and be committed and try and get your family on board as well.
Katy
And do you find that the commitment wavers if you don’t see results within your kids? Is that where you’re seeing people dropping it as well?
Kristie Prada
Yeah, I think because you might get to say age two and think, why are they not giving me a full sentence yet? But you forget that even a normal child would not be chatting away in full sentences at 2. So how would you expect them to grasp that in another language that maybe they are exposed to 20% of their week? So sometimes it’s hard to get that in perspective and it takes a lot of work, sometimes a lot of extra reading. And you might be putting a lot of time and thought into what resources you’re exposing them to. And then if you don’t get a result, you feel a bit like, oh, what am I doing? It’s all going in. It’s definitely going in. And you can see, because you can do some very simple tests, like if you’ve been talking to your child for a couple of years in the second language, you, you can literally ask them, where is the apple in that fruit bowl in your language? And just ask them to point. They don’t even have to speak. If they know and they point, you know it’s gone in. It’s just that they’re not speaking it yet. So just to keep the faith. Really.
Katy
Yeah. One more question. Is it okay to pretend that you don’t understand the other language? You know mommy only understands English.
Kristie Prada
Yeah, yeah, I know. I do know some parents that are very strict about it and just will not say another word. And the other language, we’re not quite that strict. We just generally. My husband just always says in Italiano. In Italiano. And eventually they go, oh, okay. Then they respond in Italian. You can do that. I would say do what works for you, really, but you want it to be a pleasure, not a chore. And there’ll be times when you’re all tired and your child is at the end of term and exhausted and probably the last thing he wants to do is to be pushed to do something like that. So relax about it. Don’t think that if you have one bad day that you’ve ruined everything, because it can take a few years to get there. And it will not be ruined by a bad day, a bad week or something. You just try and get back into it again the next day.
Katy
Well, you mentioned to me that you have a Facebook group that people can join. What is that?
Kristie Prada
So on the blog, I write a weekly post about bilingualism. I write about what we’ve been doing that week, what’s worked and what hasn’t, and I interview other parents that are doing the same thing. And then we’ve now got a Facebook group as well that you can join. So if you go to the Mama Prada Facebook page, I’ve actually got two groups. One is for people that love Italy and want to hear about things like that, and one is for people raising bilingual children with any language. Or it could be that you are monolingual parents and you want your children to learn languages. So it’s a community where I share things that I’ve written, things other people have written. People can write in and tell me what they’re having difficulties with. And we all try and help each other.
Katy
All right, so maybe start at www.mamaprada.com.
Kristie Prada
Yeah, you’ll find it all there.
Katy
Great. Well, Kristie Prada, thank you so much for joining us and giving us tips. And I guess if we hear a bunch of questions, maybe we can have you back on and we’ll answer listener questions.
Kristie Prada
That would be great. Thank you.
Katy
And we’ll leave it there for this week. If you have questions for Kristi Prada or topics you wish we’d explore on this show, email bittersweetlifepodcast@gmail.com or visit the contact section of our website, www.thebittersweetlife.net we are on social media, on Twitter @Bittersweetpod, and on Facebook and Instagram. Just search for The Bittersweet Life podcast and finally, share the show. Our summer Share-a-Thon is on. Tell your friends about the show. Get five of them to subscribe and let us know that you did. By participating, you get access to our super secret Truth or Dare episode. That’s the one no one else gets to hear. You’ll also be entered to win Tiffany’s book Midnight in the Piazza. Spread the word. Share the show. Thank you so much and we’ll talk to you next week.
Tiffany
Bye.
