Raising Bilingual and Multilingual Children
Raising children is not a very easy task. And raising bilingual children is even a harder work for parents, especially parents with different birth-languages. Families with more than one language have difficult time to decide on language to teach their children. A story of one of the family which recently migrated from India includes husband and wife and their two children. Both children are at the age of starting schools. One of the children has already completed one year of school in India, but the second child will start initial classes in United States. Both parents are worried about the difficulties their children will face in the classroom due to communication. Addition to communications, parents are also worried about how to maintain their own culture and language yet teach and introduce a new language that is main form of communication. Parents desire their children to have ability to read, write and speak both languages, but the task of teaching bilingualism and multilingualism to children consist hardship for parents and teachers in initial communication. Unawareness to the guidance available to raise bilingual and multilingual children and advantages that bilingualism and multilingualism provides to all ages, most parents are cautious of training their children bilingualism and multilingualism due to disadvantages it holds.
Bilingualism and multilingualism have various appealing advantages; however raising a bilingual and multilingual child has minor disadvantages like delay in speaking and mixing languages. These drawbacks are minor and curable with efforts of parents, and in some cases parent’s effort increases if bilingual child is in need of special speech therapy. Most common difficulty in raising bilingual and multilingual children is the speech delays at early age. After interviewing many parents that are teaching dual languages to their children, a research addressed on Michigan...