Our steps to raise multilingual children
Posted by gsetio on June 7, 2007
I just want to share our family’s journey in raising multilingual children. We follow the first five steps to success by Christina Bosemark.
1. Family agreement.
We agreed since I was pregnant with my first child that we will raise her to be multilinguist. A bit of background, we are Indonesian couple, lived in Singapore for about 7 years before we moved to the US. We are chinese Indonesian, my father in law is Chinese citizen, so naturally my husband speak more mandarin than I do. Working in a multinational company, there is opportunity for my husband to be relocated to China. He refuses to do so since he has limited knowledge of written chinese. So we experience the advantage of being multilingual, yet we also experience the disadvantage of not knowing written chinese. Therefore, we hope our children will be ‘true’ multilinguist and we realize the importance of starting to learn those language early.
2. Enthusiastic, yet realistic
Indonesian and English should be no problem for our family. Spoken Chinese should be achievable, but written Chinese is more tricky.
3. The practical plan
We speak Indonesian at home. We go to Indonesian church. We live in the US, English speaking community. Our challenge is to get our children enough exposure in Chinese language. The ideal scenario would be for my husband to speak only Chinese to them, I speak Indonesian, and let community language take care of English. In reality, it is difficult to strictly do that. So, we still speak Indonesian at home. We sing children songs in Chinese since our child was a baby. When she was one year old, we enroll in chinese music program at our city’s community center. Now that she is two year old, we enroll her in local chinese school, twice a week, two hours each. In future, I’ll write about that later.
4. Get together
We go to Indonesian church so we have Indonesian community. We hope to find more mandarin speaking playdates in addition to the Chinese school our daughter is attending. Anyone interested ? 
5. Be patient
Our daughter is still 2 year old, so we still waiting for the result. She does speak more Chinese since she is attending the school. Her pronunciation is better than us. Let’s hope it will work out fine. 
Posted by: Grace
Early Learning Chinese.com
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