My Limited Success in Raising Bilingual Kids

My husband and I adopted the 'one parent, one language' approach, but failed to consider factors such as time spent with the kids

- Jane Ng

My husband and I naively thought we would effortlessly raise bilingual children by implementing the "one parent, one language" approach, in which each parent consistently speaks one language to a child.

We are both fairly bilingual, at least conversationally. And we felt it was important for our children—now 19, 16 and nine—to have a reasonable grasp of both English and Mandarin, as well as the values embedded in the languages.

Even though I grew up in an English-speaking family, I spent 10 years in Special Assistance Planned (SAP) schools taking Chinese language at a higher level, which helped improve my command of the language.

But speaking it did not come as naturally for me as it did for my husband, who grew up in a Mandarin-speaking family.

Before our first child was born, we decided that I would speak to our son in English and my husband would speak to him in Mandarin.

It worked well in the early years, as we tried our best to keep to this approach. Our son, and later our daughter, would naturally reply to my husband in Mandarin and they could understand most of what was said to them.

The pre-school my children attended had both an English and a Chinese teacher in class at all times, so that helped in our quest to raise bilingual children.

It wasn't until our two older children entered primary school that it became apparent that they were far stronger in English than in Mandarin.

So, where did we go wrong?

First, we did not anticipate that we wouldn't spend an equal amount of time with the children.