Life Kit - How to raise kids in a multilingual home

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

There are a lot of benefits to raising a child speaking two or more languages: a better understanding of their culture and their relatives, cognitive benefits and expanded job opportunities. But raising a kid is hard enough in one language. How can a parent be expected to do it in two or more? Reporter Julia Furlan explains that raising a kid in a multilingual household isn't a burden — it's a gift.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Life Kit from NPR. Hey everybody, it's Marielle. When reporter Julia Furlan and her spouse had a baby, they knew they wanted their child to be able to connect with Julia's Brazilian family and to grow up speaking both English and Portuguese. But Julia is the only Portuguese speaker in the house. Three. Four. After four, what comes? Four. But Julia is the only Portuguese speaker in the house. And for whatever reason, she felt a little weird

speaking Portuguese to a baby who couldn't talk back. Until she did. Julia says it was exhilarating to watch her kid light up like this. Four. Five. Ten. Seven.

Seven. Even though I was the one who was actively trying to make it happen, my mind was still blown when Leo started speaking Portuguese. It also made me kind of emotional in a way that I did not expect. It's like all of a sudden I remembered being a kid in Brazil in a different way. And I think that one of the things that's really wonderful about it is that there's so much Brazilian-ness in Portuguese. So there are these like little diminutives. Like you say, instead of boom, which is bread, you say pãozinho, which is like little bread. And to hear her doing these

tiny little things that are so Brazilian really excites me. About 22% of people in the US ages 5 and older speak a language other than English at home. Now if you're thinking, hey I want my kids to be bilingual too, you're in luck. Today on LifeKit, raising kids who speak more than one language. Reporter Julia Furlan talks with speech therapists about how to fold the learning into your kids' day-to-day life. She also busts a common myth about teaching kids a second language. And she has a lot of fun. Being a parent can already feel like life on hard mode.

And sometimes when there's a mountain of laundry and you're not sure if you're going to be able to afford college because of the sheer number of berries you're having to buy, it's hard to imagine adding any layer of complication to the mix. But raising a child in a bilingual or multilingual household actually isn't a burden. It's a key that unlocks an entire world. Farwah Hussain is a bilingual speech pathologist who speaks Urdu, Hindi, and English. So speech-language pathology falls into this huge, wonderful umbrella of things that we can do. When we work with children and adults, so across the lifespan…

She's also raising three children multilingually, so she gets it. Side note that in this episode I'm using bilingual and multilingual interchangeably because there are plenty of families who speak three or more languages at home. Basically we're talking about learning more than one language. Farwa says that there's a whole laundry list of benefits to bilingualism. First of all, it's so fun to be able to speak another language. Yeah, think about the job opportunities that can open up down the line for your kid. And then you have better cognitive function, you're able to multitask better. And these are real skills that your kids are going to need.

Research has also shown that being bilingual has benefits not only for children, but throughout a person's entire life. There are better problem-solving skills, and actually research says it delays the onset of dementia as well if you are bilingual. The study that Farwa is referencing says that bilingualism may delay the onset of dementia by up to five years. Though, for all you monolinguals who might be looking up a language learning app right now, the results are inconclusive about the protective benefits of learning a language much later in life. But don't let that stop you. And when it comes to kids, they're taking it all in. They are like sponges absorbing everything that they're hearing and they're seeing.

Liliana Diaz is a bilingual speech pathologist who works in Spanish and English, and she says she's seen bilingualism open up worlds for the kids she works with, as well as her own two kids. The fact that your child can go to another country and speak another language and speak fluently, connect with so many other people, connect with, you know, extended family members, and later down the road get a job that you know because you speak more than one language you know there's there's just so much to it. Okay so now that we're clear that there are benefits how do families go about bilingualism? The answer to this question is a rich and varied tapestry.

You know it's going to be different in every family and that's okay. That's totally fine No bilingual is the same like there literally will not be a bilingual person that is the same as the next so It's totally fine is usually what I tell parents and that brings us to our first takeaway pick a style Even though there are a million ways to be multilingual, let's start off by going through some of the most common ones. So there's one parent one language, which is what I do with Leo. I speak to her in Portuguese, but my spouse speaks to her in English.

There's also minority language at home, which is where everybody will say, speak, or do, and then as the child goes to school, they're exposed to the majority language, which, if this is the US, is English. Time and place is another way to do it. Here's Farwa again. You block the day. We're in the mornings, maybe you're speaking one language, then you're speaking another. The last of these more commonly used techniques is called mixed language at home, which is pretty self-explanatory. The caregivers speak all the languages simultaneously,

which may sound confusing, but really is not a problem. Children are wonderfully resilient, and they will start picking up on how you are providing them that input. And they are so great at being able to tease apart the ways and the languages together. Both Farwah and our other speech language pathologist, Lilliana, agreed that when you're choosing a style, there's no one way that's going to be best for everyone. The best style of bilingual learning is the one that your family can do consistently and

meaningfully. Take my family growing up, where we mostly spoke English at home, but once or twice a year we went to Brazil to visit my family. I would show up feeling awkward and went to Brazil to visit my family. I would show up feeling awkward, and I remember whispering things to my parents. How do you say this? How do you say that in Portuguese? I'd open my mouth and my Portuguese would feel halting and rusty. And I would use last year's slang, which felt very uncool.

But I was so desperate to be liked by my pack of cousins, I would carefully copy their slang. And by the time we left Brazil, my fluency was so desperate to be liked by my pack of cousins, I would carefully copy their slang. And by the time we left Brazil, my fluency was so back that I was actually dreaming in Portuguese. Kans Priti grew up speaking Portuguese, English, and Spanish. She's a deputy editor at Business Insider, who's been writing about parenting for about seven years. She's raising her three children, two of whom are twins, which I feel like I need to say

just to give her so much credit. Anyway, she's raising the three of them bilingually with English and Spanish. Yeah, so there's words that they only say in Spanish. Like today we're talking about getting a lollipop if they were nice and got their shoes and coats quickly and got in the car. And so they use the word chupatín instead of lollipop. Conn's and her husband are doing one parent one language, where she speaks to her children in Spanish and her husband speaks to them in English. She says she doesn't really keep track of what language they're using to respond to her. She sees it as her job to use the Spanish and just trust that it's getting in there. I have friends who have told me, like, I don't know how to get my kid to answer to me

in my native language. Um, I don't make them. I don't force them. I don't tell them to respond in Spanish. They can respond to me in whatever language they want, but I know that they get it. The first time she and her husband brought all three children to Argentina to visit family, she was actually shocked. From the moment they landed, her oldest, who was four at the

time, just lit up. And he just started fluently speaking in Spanish with all of my family. With like no hesitation, no mistakes, like suddenly it clicked and it was just like absolutely fluent. And I was like, he never talked to me in in Spanish but it's all in there. Kids are sponges and cons is modeling something that is our second takeaway. No matter what method you're using to bring bilingualism into your family the most important thing is to do it consistently. Liliana, one of our speech therapists, says that there are a lot of different ways to achieve that consistency too.

Consistency, not perfection. Whether that's like listening to music in the car, watching those cartoon characters on TV in Spanish, whether that's doing play dates, whether it's reading time during a certain time of the day, whether it's a family conversation during a certain time of the day, but being consistent with it so that they constantly get that exposure to that language. I think as caregivers, it's easy to get a little lost in the sauce or overwhelmed when you think about having to do something all the time, every day, forever. But staying consistent with little habits really does add up. That's what it takes to learn a language. It's consistency and exposure and practice.

So it's all about just practice, practice, practice, and exposing your little one to it as well, too. What consistency looks like in practice will be different for each family, too. For me and my family, it means I almost always translate the books I read to Leo into Portuguese, even when they're in English. I asked Hans for her advice to parents trying to stay consistent.

I think the most important thing is do what you can slash feels right, right? Like, if you can afford expensive language lessons, by all means, do it. If you can send your kid to like an immersion school, great, do it. If you can send your kid to like a immersion school, great, do it. But if you can't, like don't feel limited by that because you can still read books in Spanish or whatever language. Khan says that even something as simple

as making sure the shows they watch are all in another language can add to that consistency. Though I should note that when it comes to screen time, research shows that it needs to be just one of many ways that the child is exposed to language, not the only thing. But while we're talking about screen time, one thing that has proven to be beneficial is FaceTiming relatives, says Farwah.

So being able to FaceTime a grandparent, or a sibling, or a cousin cousin or even an aunt and uncle and have that back and forth with them in another language in the home language is so important and you're building those same skills in as if you were doing it in person. And as you build that consistency, your child will get to a point like Kansa's kids did. It's really interesting because sometimes they say like, oh, I don't understand Spanish. And I'm like, but you understand what I'm saying right now. And they're like, yeah. And I'm like, well, it's Spanish. And they're like, oh, I feel like they don't have yet sort of like the

consciousness of like, these are two languages that you understand at the same time. It's sort of like that saying, does a fish know it's in water? And look, I've been trying to create at least a few new habits for several months now, I'm looking at you, New Year's resolutions, and that consistency part is really difficult. In Liliana's family, they modeled something that I think is really important to highlight, which is to find the way that's most natural for your family so that you can keep up with the habit. As a speech language pathologist, Liliana was really dedicated to the idea of having her son speak Spanish. Her husband was also raised bilingual with Spanish and English, and before her son

was born, they spoke Spanglish between the two of them. But when Itza was born, they decided to go only Spanish. Um, and so I was like, no, if we're gonna, you know, really try to raise our kiddo to speak Spanish, we have to really only speak Spanish at home. But it didn't entirely feel right. I would find myself a lot of the times kind of being like, how do you say, like, how do you say this or how do you say that in Spanish and then grabbing my phone really quick. Picking up her phone all the time to check certain words wasn't working because it took them out of

the flow of normal conversation. And I was like, no, that's too much pausing. That's like not natural. And so I told my husband, I was like, it's okay if we don't know the word, like say it in English. So they changed tactics. Later down the road, I was like, nope, it's okay. We can speak Spanish at home, because then we were like really trying to force it. Being consistent isn't about being completely rigid. It's about finding the easiest way to stay true to your goal of having a multilingual family.

And now it's time for us to do a little myth busting. One of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that learning another language can cause a kid to start speaking later or that it can be confusing for them. But here's the thing, that's total bunk. Not true at all. And that is takeaway three. Growing up bilingual or multilingual does not cause a speech delay or confuse a kid. That's one of the biggest fears parents have, that they're going to mess up their child

in everything. Farwa sees it all the time, where parents are worried that being multilingual will somehow set a child back, especially with the children that she works with who are often neurodivergent. That myth of bilingualism creating a language delay is totally false. But Farwa says that despite this myth being so prevalent, the research doesn't back it up. It may happen that the child is quiet because they're taking in both languages, but what research says is when the child acquires both those languages, they're at age level with their monolingual peers. Liliana Diaz says that this idea of bilingual learning setting students back is so insidious,

she even encountered it from a caseworker at a school she was working at. My case manager kind of chimed in at the time and was like, and by the way, make sure you only speak English to them because if you start speaking in Spanish, you're going to confuse your child and she's not going to make progress. This was almost a decade ago when Liliana was still fairly new to her career and it felt awful. My heart sank and it just sank into my stomach

the fact that now someone at the table in front of me said this to the parent. And I tried to remain as professional as possible, but I like immediately interfered and I was like, no, like what? That is not true. Liliana tried to fight back and make sure that the parent would still work bilingually, but the caseworker had already planted that insidious myth. I still think back to like that day and I'm just like, I wonder what happened with that parent. The thing is, research doesn't just suggest that bilingualism doesn't hinder speech or

cause confusion. Don't forget, all those benefits we talked about earlier will come along with the language. Because remember, this can be fun. And that brings us to our fourth takeaway, which is to find the joy. One family Farwa was working with was from India and their home language was Telugu. We had a non-speaking child.

He didn't have any words and all he was doing was opening, closing doors. Farwa works with a lot of children who are neurodivergent or on the autism spectrum. She made a point to meet the child where he was at. She got right down there on the floor and started opening and closing the doors. We realized one of the beautiful songs in

Telugu is a nursery rhyme that's a peekaboo song. It's a tiger, moota, da da da, do do do do do. It has this beautiful beat to it. We started opening and closing the door with the beat. I don't speak the language. And if I butcher the song, I'm sorry guys. But it was such a beautiful connection that we made sure that we added the song into the child's AAC device.

That's an augmentative and alternative communication device, which is a fancy way of saying a device that helps a person communicate without speaking. It can look like a tablet or a button, but even texting or using sign language is considered AAC. So he, anytime he wanted to come play, that's the song that he would press. And before you know it, he started singing, which then turned to words. And it's those beautiful connections in any language that we can start with. Bringing joy to the task of learning the language is fun for both the caregiver and the child.

And to any parent that has listened to Wheels on the Bus more than they ever thought possible, don't despair. It doesn't just have to be nursery rhymes in English and being able to go, Row, row, row your boat. You can make sure that you're singing any Bollywood song that you want, and music is very joyful. Now, if only I could get Leo back into Beyoncé. But when I was talking to Farwa, she cited research that children learn through play. And when I dug into it, I found a clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics that says, quote, play is not frivolous.

It enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function. In other words, play is essential to how children learn, and it literally helps their brains. And the good news is that because children are always learning, you don't have to do or buy anything special to make the learning happen. Liliana says that with her three-year-old son, that looks like strengthening his connection to his culture every chance she gets. I really try to tie it to our culture all the time and whether that is like celebrating like certain holidays like Dia de los Muertos and being able to take him to Mexico and talking about las ofrendas.

And celebrating his connection to Mexico is paying off. Itzael knows where he comes from. I really enjoy that and trying to create that connection for him as well too so that he knows that language is his culture which is his identity. Being bilingual isn't some massive other thing that's outside of your life. It can just be part of everyday existence. And I should say too that it's never too late to start. Sure, it might be easier when a child is younger, but finding fun and playing with language is a lifelong thing, and you can start whenever it feels right. Hell, you don't even have to have a kid.

Fire up that language learning app and give it a shot. The fun is there for everybody. And one tip that Liliana had is if you're speaking one language and your child is code mixing, which is mixing languages in conversation, to see that as a yes and opportunity instead of correcting it. The best part is watching her son's little lightbulb flicker on as he learned new words made her so unbelievably happy, and I could not agree more.

When I had a child, I knew it would be exciting and challenging in all kinds of new ways, but when I started speaking with her in Portuguese, I don't think I realized it would kick up so many emotions for me. All of a sudden, when talking to Leo, I'll remember how my vovó, my grandmother, would tell me to have juízo, or good judgment, when I left the house. I sing, palma palma palma, pe pe pe, and boom! I'm on the playground singing it with my cousin Tarita. My parents raised me bilingual, which means I understand on the playground singing it with my cousin Tarita. My parents raised me bilingual, which means I understand inherently the gift that it was. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, I kind of made it my entire personality at various points in my life, but in a real way, I understand that being

bilingual made my world so much bigger. And I want that for my kid. This month we're going to Sao Paulo to visit my family and I cannot wait to see everybody and eat pão de queijo and have a churrasco. But the thing I'm most excited about is watching her run around in a pack of cousins and friends, understanding it all and taking it in. There aren't a lot of moments in parenting where you get confirmation that you're doing the right thing. There's always a lot of moments in parenting where you get confirmation that you're doing the right thing. There's always a little bit of doubt. But in that moment, I gotta say, I think I'll know.

So let's recap our takeaways so you can start that bilingual life, shall we? Takeaway 1. Pick a style. Whether it's one parent one language, time and place, or mixed languages at home, find the thing that works for your family. Takeaway 2. Consistency is key. Find a way to keep it up.

Then we have takeaway 3. Bilingualism doesn't cause a delay or confusion. Kids are sponges. And finally, we have takeaway four, which is find the joy. Language learning is actually a lot of fun. That was reporter Julia Furlough. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. There's one about traveling with kids and another on how to be a good auntie. You can find those at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love Life Kit and want even more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter.

Also we love hearing from you, so if you have episode ideas or feedback you want to share, email us at lifekit at npr.org. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. Our visuals editor is Beck Harlin, and our digital editor is Malika Grieve. Megan Cain is our supervising editor, and Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagel, Claire Marie Schneider, Margaret Serino, and Sylvie Douglas. Engineering support comes from Gilly Moon and Patrick Murray,

with fact-checking by Greta Pittinger. I'm Mariel Sagata. Thanks for listening.