lizkat
Watching March roll out real winter
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2020
- Posts
- 7,341
Multilingual households of my family and friends usually produced kids fluent in both from the get-go, but they became attuned to speaking English outside the home unless in a venue where the other language was understood. Children spoke the preferred language of guests in the house at a given time or else replied in the language used in addressing them. It was their mothers who were proficiently bilingual to begin with, so already used to switching back and forth depending on circumstances.
Once in awhile the dads might have felt left out of some conversations but not for long. If it's your mother-in-law talking and you don't get it, your wife will enlighten you before you pay too high a price anyway, no?
Homework assistance was done in English (unless it was about formal instruction in the second language of that family in which case the moms usually oversaw it). As far as I could tell though, disciplinary measures were meted out in native language of whichever parent decided to give it a go at the time. In the kitchen when it wasn't about pizza etc., then the language used was perhaps more often the one with the spicier cuisine.
Once in awhile the dads might have felt left out of some conversations but not for long. If it's your mother-in-law talking and you don't get it, your wife will enlighten you before you pay too high a price anyway, no?
Homework assistance was done in English (unless it was about formal instruction in the second language of that family in which case the moms usually oversaw it). As far as I could tell though, disciplinary measures were meted out in native language of whichever parent decided to give it a go at the time. In the kitchen when it wasn't about pizza etc., then the language used was perhaps more often the one with the spicier cuisine.