Raising children in a mixed-language family comes with its own unique set of joys and hurdles, but the rewards are profound. This blog, written by three passionate professionals, draws on our collective experience and evidence-based guidance to inspire your multilingual journey.
Our collective insights explore the importance of maintaining heritage languages, the factors that help or hinder language retention, and the lifelong benefits of multilingualism. These resources will show you that raising bilingual children is not only achievable but deeply rewarding—and that no family has to do it alone.
Whether you’re just starting out or seeking new ways to support your children’s language development, BilingualFamily.org is here to help. Together, we’ll navigate the challenges, celebrate the victories, and nurture a multilingual future for your family and community.
Part 1 : The Personal and Family Benefits of Multilingualism
Written by Ricky Magee
Strengthening Family Bonds
Language is one of the most powerful tools for connection. For our family, raising our boys in a multilingual environment has been both a journey and a gift. Watching them navigate conversations with their grandparents in their native languages or laugh with cousins over shared cultural jokes has been a constant reminder of how language bridges generations.
More than that, passing on my heritage language to our boys has deepened the emotional bond we share. Each bedtime story in my native tongue, and each moment of discovery has felt like a thread weaving us closer together. It’s in these moments that I see how much they’ve absorbed—not just words, but pieces of my heart and history. I love them to bits, and every step of this journey reminds me that language is one of the greatest gifts I can give them.
If you’re new here, welcome! I’m so glad you’ve found BilingualFamily.org. I wish I’d had a resource like this when we first started our multilingual journey. Having access to practical advice and community support makes a world of difference when you’re navigating the joys and challenges of raising bilingual children.
What’s truly inspiring about the journey is knowing that you’re not alone. Around the world, there is a vibrant and supportive community of parents, educators, and linguists who share the same goal: helping children thrive in multilingual environments. At BilingualFamily.org, we believe that with the right resources and encouragement, anyone can successfully raise bilingual children. Together, we can celebrate every small victory, from a toddler’s first words in another language to a teenager’s pride in their multicultural identity.
As a testament to where multilingualism can lead, our own journey has inspired us to establish Next Level English , the first heritage language school for English. This milestone reflects our commitment to nurturing linguistic and cultural connections—not only within families but across communities.
Cultural Pride and Understanding
Maintaining heritage languages in mixed-language families isn’t just about preserving vocabulary; it’s about celebrating the cultural richness that defines us. As a parent, I’ve seen how language has shaped my children’s pride in their multicultural heritage. For them, speaking multiple languages isn’t just practical—it’s a source of joy. They love celebrating holidays in different styles, learning songs from various traditions, and connecting with people in their native tongues.
Through BilingualFamily.org, we extend this celebration of diversity to the families we work with. Whether it’s encouraging a child to read a story in their second (or third or fourth!) language or helping parents find resources to support bilingual learning, our goal is to create a community where every family’s linguistic journey is valued. We believe that raising bilingual or multilingual children is a gift that keeps on giving, one that equips them to be empathetic and adaptable citizens of the world.
Part 2 : Factors that Contribute to or Hinder Language Maintenance
Written by Marisa Filgueras Gómez
Maintaining our children’s languages is a way to help them shape, create and live their identity. It is also their right. However, language maintenance is not an easy task and is affected by several factors: the age kids started to learn their language; more exposure to one language over another; quantity and quality of the input; access to bilingual/multilingual education; the feeling of belonging to the culture/s or cultural communities of their languages; attitudes toward their languages; and language ideologies parents, family members, friends and all community members may have about kids’ languages, what does it means to speak (“well”) the language and how frequently they should use it.
The age and order of acquisition of their languages affect the levels of proficiency they have in them, which in turn affects how easy or difficult it is to maintain them. If a child starts learning one of their languages after a certain age (frequently during puberty) they may not be able to acquire all of the features of that language the same way they did their first language. Moreover, when a child starts learning the majority language (i.e., the language widely spoken in the community where the child lives) at an early age, the language abilities in the other language/s tend to be weaker.
It is crucial to maintain exposure to their languages. Multilingual children typically have unbalanced exposure to their languages. They listen to, read, see one language more frequently than another, and these different amounts of exposure have an impact. In fact, whether our multilingual children first learned and spoke only their minority language at home and the majority language once they start school, bilingual children become more dominant in the language of education and they display more variation in the competence of their minority language(s), especially compared to monolingual speakers of those varieties. Being able to create situations and contexts for our children to be exposed to in their languages is really important as richer exposure has been associated with better proficiency levels, while reduced input and exposure has been associated with lower levels of proficiency.
Because the language of education has a great impact on our children’s language development, one of the best ways to develop and maintain their languages is to enroll them in bilingual schools if possible. Being in an educational environment where they have higher exposure and possibly a more varied input, and where they need to use their languages in more contexts than the ones frequently provided by parents, gives them the opportunity to develop, use, and maintain their languages.
Because using the language (reading, speaking, listening and writing) is crucial to maintain it, helping our children to develop a strong feeling of belonging to the culture(s) or cultural communities will make them want to interact in it. Fostering this feeling of belonging or identity is sometimes difficult, as in order to fit in, children tend to prefer to identify with only one culture, frequently the majority culture of the community where they live.
This feeling of belonging is also affected by external factors such as how frequently the children see other members of the same minority community, how frequently they travel to the country of the language, and even how members of these community receive and react to their bilingualism and their (varied) levels of proficiency in those languages. If children feel a connection and a strong identification with the culture of their languages, there will be a personal investment in maintaining the language.
This ties to their attitudes toward their languages which sometimes affects their level of linguistic confidence. Having a strong linguistic confidence is important for them to keep the language alive. Linguistic insecurity is frequently born and developed in very close and familiar environments when friends and family react negatively to the children’s levels of proficiency in the minority language (whether in our country or in our home country), as a consequence of language purity ideologies and the notion of what it means to speak “well” a language. Familial or friend teasing can lead to negative self-perception which consequently can lead to refusal to speak the language. It is important that our close community (i.e., friends and family) understands what it means to be bilingual/multilingual and that they happily embrace our children’s diverse (levels of) languages.
Part 3 : Benefits of multilingualism
Written by Kaisa Pankakoski
Multilingualism is extremely beneficial both to society and individuals. It offers us numerous personal, economic, social, political, and cultural benefits. Multilingual and/or transnational people enhance a nation’s cultural diversity and serve as valuable linguistic assets, contributing to economic gains in the global economy and trade.
For parents raising a multilingual child, maintaining a heritage language can be crucial to support a child’s identity development, teach them about their heritage, and maintain intergenerational communication between the child and grandparents. Academic studies show that parents of multilingual children view multilingualism as a gift that opens doors; it gives the children opportunities that may not be available without the language. Parents have mentioned various motivations for raising bilingual or multilingual children, including preserving cultural ties, enhancing future economic opportunities, and boosting cognitive abilities. Recent immigrants often feel the need to communicate in their native language, which they associate with their emotions. Some wish to maintain the children’s language skills in case they return to their home country.
Although it is common for children to resist the transmission of a foreign heritage language at some point—all of the 31 multilingual case study children in a PhD study across two countries reported benefiting from a multilingual upbringing. In studies of potentially multilingual adults or adolescents, those who did not inherit a language often wish their parents had helped them learn it. In this PhD case study children took pride in their multilingual identity and language skills. Even if they weren’t as proficient in every language as monolingual peers (which is rarely the case for polyglots), their knowledge of a language was viewed positively and as a source of pride. The children viewed multilingualism as beneficial both now and, in the future, as it enabled them to communicate with people from different countries and function in societies abroad. Many enjoyed having a ‘secret language’ with a parent, grandparent, or friend; they were able to discuss anything in public places in their language and nobody understood them!
Read more
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