“I wish I had learnt our native language.”

It’s a complaint often heard from first-generation American children, “I wish I had

learnt our native language.”

Teaching your child your native language can provide a valuable bonding activity, broaden their worldview and set them up for success in an increasingly competitive job market. Moreover, being able to communicate effectively with all their family insulates your child from mental distress and the risk of behavior problems as they grow.  

Setting your child up for success requires patience, planning and establishing pillars of community support. However, with these tools in place, you’ll enable your child to live a richer and more fulfilling life. 

Supporting bilingualism at home 

There is more than one way to raise a bilingual child— and as their parent, you should feel empowered to choose a strategy that works best for your family. 

Some parents speak primarily in their native language at home, and use a secondary language such as English for public spaces like school. Other parents split the language amongst themselves— one speaks to the child primarily in the native language, and the other primarily communicates in English. When each language is learned may also vary: parents may introduce both languages together, or introduce the second after the child has a grasp on their first language. 

Initiating children into the native language

Here are a few key tips to keep in mind as you begin to share your native language with your child: 

  • Exposure is key: From birth, you should do your best to expose your child to your native language as much as you can. Speaking to them, playing movies in your native language or even playing music on the radio can be valuable ways to start building their vocabulary. 
  • Use action words: Kids want to have fun! Focus on teaching action verbs first — like “run” “dance” or “sing”. You can pair the word with doing the action, which helps keep your child engaged. 
  • Make a face: Effective communication is about more than words. As your child communicates, mimicking their facial expressions, tone and body language is key to encouraging them to engage with you. 
  • Narrate your day: Your child is naturally curious about the world around them. Use that curiosity to your advantage — as you are performing basic tasks like feeding, bathing and brushing teeth, you can explain your actions to your child in your native language.
  • Singing vs. saying: There’s a reason we all learn the alphabet as a song! Children are able to learn more information at once when it’s put to music. A catchy beat also helps with memory recall. 
  • Connect with family: Involve your child in conversations with your extended family and other native language speakers — allowing them to build relationships with their grandparents, relatives and cousins will encourage them to continue learning the language.  

Navigating challenges and considerations 

Many parents choose to communicate primarily in English when their child reaches preschool. Your child is entering a brand-new environment, and for the first time, they will be without you to guide them. Every parent fears that their child’s needs will be misunderstood, and that they won’t be able to communicate with their teachers and potential playmates. 

I was guilty of this as a new parent. I only spoke to my firstborn in English, because I worried whether his teachers would understand what he was communicating across both Gujarati and English. I did not want to accidentally isolate him from his peers. I failed to recognize that now, not later, was the best time to be exposing him to multiple languages. Children learn languages through unconscious memory— essentially, the more you expose your child to the language you want them to learn, the more easily they can pick it up. 

Some parents worry that exposing their child to multiple different languages may lead to a language delay. Perhaps your child takes longer to say a sentence in Gujarati than they may take to say the same sentence in English. Do not panic— this is your child actively learning and drawing connections between both languages! A true speech delay would occur across all languages that a child is learning, and learning more than one language has no impact on whether or not your child may face a speech delay. 

Communicating cultural differences 

By the time my second child was born, I knew that I needed to consciously teach both my children Gujarati and English. When it came time for my younger son to enroll in daycare, I brought a list of Gujarati words that he knew to his teacher, along with their meanings and pronunciations. 

This encouraged my son’s teacher to learn these words for herself, and allowed her to draw connections between Gujarati and English as she communicated with my son. By reinforcing the behavior he already saw at home, this helped solidify the vocabulary he was learning and make him a more impactful communicator in both languages. 

The more insight you can bring to your child’s teacher, the better equipped you will be to create a supportive environment. Even if the educator does not have experience with your native language, just explaining to them how your child communicates can help them view their interactions through a different lens, empowering them to be able to respond effectively.

Building a community of support

Many parents have the same goal — to build the best possible future for their children. Being an active and present parent is a full-time job. When looking to introduce bilingualism into your home, consider exploring educational resources in your local community.

A few resources I would recommend looking into include: 

  • Speak Your Language: A campaign supported by OneAmerica, the largest immigrant advocacy group in Washington DC, providing research and resources for bilingual families. 
  • Talking is Teaching: This resource offers tips and toolkits to encourage parents to talk, read and sing to their children daily, which can be implemented across languages. 
  • Bilingual Monkeys: This website, hosted by Adam Beck (who, alongside his wife, raised Japanese & English-speaking children) provides resources and tested advice for raising bilingual children. 

You are not alone in raising a bilingual child. Know that every step you take today is expanding their worldview, enhancing their thought process and building more possibilities for a brighter future. 

Avani Shah is a practicing speech-language pathologist with over 25 years of experience. Originally from India, Avani understood the need for multilingual services firsthand. She is polylingual and has...