Raising Bilingual Children: Common Parental Concerns and Current Research by Kendall King and Lyn Fogle, Georgetown University

Te purpose of this digest is to help pediatricians, speech language pathologists, classroom teachers, and other professionals who work with bilingual children and their parents understand common parental concerns related to bilingual childrearing and become familiar with the current science on bilingual child development. Greater insight into both issues will allow these professionals to provide more effective and scientifically sound advice to parents.

A growing number of U.S. parents view bilingualism as a laudable family goal. Te reasons for this trend include a desire to maintain ties to the parents’ heritage language and culture, to provide children with academic and cognitive advantages, and to promote cross- cultural understanding and communication. Yet research indicates that success in raising children to be bilingual remains the exception in the United States, as most children eventually become English dominant or even monolingual in English (Wong Fillmore, 2000). Tis is due at least in part to the high status of English and the limited number of opportunities available for children to learn languages other than English. Research also indicates that parents’ beliefs, attitudes, and interactions with their children are important in helping children become bilingual (De Houwer, 1998; Lanza, 1997).

In order to better inform early childhood professionals, who can play a key role in shaping parents’ beliefs and behaviors, we conducted individual in-depth interviews with 24 economically and culturally diverse families in Washington, DC, all of whom aimed to raise their children (then ages 0 to 5) as Spanish-English bilinguals (King & Fogle, in press). Here we summarize, in four key points, the findings of our investigation in light of the current research literature on bilingual development:

• Although many parents believe that bilingualism results in language delay, research suggests that monolingual and bilingual children meet major language developmental milestones at similar times.

• Despite many parents’ fear that using two languages will result in confusion for their children, there is no research evidence to support this. On the contrary, use of two languages in the same conversation has been found to be a sign of mastery of both languages.

• Many parents rely heavily on television to teach the second language; yet this is best considered a fun source of secondary support for language learning. Human interaction is the best method for fostering language learning.

• Contrary to the widespread notion among parents that bilingualism results in “bigger, better brains,” parents more realistically can expect their bilingual children to gain specific advantages in targeted areas, such as greater understanding of language as an abstract system.