Hi all, does anyone else have an issue where one language goes left to right, and the other right to left, and that confuses the baby? I’m not sure if it’s regular baby stuff or if it’s reading books of both languages to her, but she often tries to flip the pages of a book in both directions. I feel like it’s probably just normal baby stuff at 1 years old, but I’m curious if this might be a problem later down the line? Thanks!

Hi all. I’m speaking exclusively in Greek to my 15-month-old son, but I’m worried about keeping it up long-term. My Greek is good enough to live in Greece and get by comfortably, but I struggle with more complex topics and wouldn’t be able to translate this paragraph into Greek for example. I feel confident teaching him Greek as a child, but I’m unsure how I’ll manage as he gets older and our conversations get deeper. I’m American and my native language is in English.

On top of that, I saw lovevery has a new Teaching Your Kid How to Read kit that I’d love to use with him. But how do I teach him how to read in English when I’m prioritizing speaking to him in Greek?

I’d love to hear from others with intermediate language skills. how did you manage to keep up teaching your kids over the years?

We're raising our almost 3YO is a multi-language home, dad and I (mostly) speak only our respective languages to her, and we live in a country where 2 other languages are spoken. Apart from that, husband and I speak English between us. We don't speak it directly to our LO, but we can see that she understands (some) of it as well.

She seems to communicate ok in all the languages she speaks, but mixes them quite a bit, which means sometimes we need to 'translate' what she's saying to our families, etc. It's not been flagged as an issue in daycare, so I assume she's managing to communicate well there in the local language. I'm metioning this because I'm unsure how much this is normal for kids this age in general, or for multi lingual kids.

We're considering introducing her to English as well - for example through some songs or age appropriate cartoons. Though she doesn't get a lot of cartoon time yet, when she does, we're never quite sure if it'd be best to play things in a local langage, or in English.

So my question is, given the 'complex' language landscape she is being brought up in, is it ok to introduce English as well, or should we wait to do that at a later age (what age)? Any advice from parents in similar situations?

I was raised speaking Urdu and Punjabi at home and later acquired English and German at a young age. My German husband and I only speak English to each other, regardless of which country we're currently living in, and we move quite a bit because of his job.

When my son came around, I thought I would do OPOL with Urdu but I quickly started slacking off because it felt strange to exclude other people from the conversation and I found it's much easier to find songs and books in English rather than Urdu so most of the "fun" we were having was also in English, even if I tried to speak a lot of Urdu on a particular day. More recently, I have started to translate the songs and books on the fly and as a SAHM I think there is still a lot of time and potential to improve his Urdu but I'm not sure whether OPOL is the most effective method for me and whether it's too late?

We are not too worried about him acquiring German because he will likely pick that up in German schools but I'm quite worried about the Urdu. He already speaks a few, complete sentences in English and select words in Urdu. Should I try and only speak Urdu to him from now on or only speak Urdu until his dad comes home and then switch to English? I worry that once he knows there is no need for him to speak Urdu, he just won't.

Anyone in a similar situation who might want to share their success stories? Sorry, this post is so haphazard. I just had surgery and am coming off the anesthesia at the hospital with not much else to worry about for a change ^^

I have an interesting somewhat theoretical question about how OPOL with two minority languages compares to OPOL with one minority language + community language.

Two friends of mine are both multilingual and are vaguely considering having kids. Their community language is English, both are native/fluent in it, and that’s the language of their relationship. One of them has a heritage language (let’s call it HL) that they would like to pass on to their kids and the other one has just started studying that same language. The HL-native partner has family nearby speaking HL whom they see often, but otherwise, there are not too many other HL speakers living nearby.

Aside from English and HL, these two folks are both moderately competent in yet another minority language (let’s call it ML) which is one of the languages commonly taught in local schools and is spoken by local nannies and at some local daycares and language immersion schools. They each know a few other languages but currently, they only overlap on English, ML, and to some extent HL. (Worth pointing out that these three languages all come from different language groups.)

Their main language goal is to pass on HL to their theoretical kids and hopefully have their kids become active (speaking) bilinguals in HL so that they can communicate with family that lives nearby and ideally also read in that language. Their secondary goal is to pass on the love of language learning, but at least in the early years, it’s not as crucial as the goal of efficiently passing on HL. Eventually, they expect that ML will be one of the languages their kids will learn through school if not earlier, but neither of them has any sentimental attachment to ML, it just happens to be one of the languages they know in common. (One of them is also currently working on improving ML for professional reasons.)

The most obvious language setup for this family seems to be OPOL where the HL-native partner speaks HL as much as possible, certainly to the child but also perhaps to the other partner who is eagerly learning that language and is interested in improving. The non-HL-native partner, meanwhile, uses English most of the time but might consider also using HL somewhat as their capacities in that language improve. 

But this family could also theoretically try doing OPOL with both HL and ML if they want to. They could do this and either continue to use English to speak to each other when around their kids or they could go an even more ambitious route and just communicate solely in HL + ML, foregoing English altogether. They both have a well-developed growth mindset with respect to language learning so even this ambitious setup is theoretically possible. In either of these setups, the non-HL-native partner could also sometimes elect to speak HL just as they would if English were their main OPOL language since the couple's main goal is to bolster HL.

So my question: If strengthening HL and getting their kids to speak HL are their most important goals in these early years, which, if any, of the above setups is most conducive to achieving that goal, all things being equal (that is, if the HL-native partner speaks the same amount of HL in each scenario)?

One obvious answer is that it shouldn't matter whether the second OPOL language is ML or English -- the strength of HL is just proportional to the amount of time that the HL-native partner uses HL and it's as simple as that.

But for some reason, my intuition is that using ML as the second OPOL language instead of the community language (English) might actually benefit the development of HL, though that’s just my hunch. And this is despite the fact that HL and ML are completely unrelated languages. With all the families I know, those who practice OPOL with one minority language + community language tend to have kids who elect to speak just the community language, whereas those that have two minority languages in their OPOL setup more often have kids who will elect to speak both of those minority languages for some reason.

But that's just my tiny dataset, so I wonder what the rest of you all think about this.

I'm looking for a YouTube channel/Spotify artist that is like Ms. Rachel, but in Spanish. This has been asked before on this sub, but all the suggestions seemed to be adaptations of Ms. Rachel and the songs she sings into Spanish - Aprende Peques is very obviously this.

Are there any channels comparable to Ms. Rachel that are native to the Spanish language? Think an updated Cri-Cri. What do Mexican, Columbian, Chilean, etc. parents play for their toddlers?

Hi everyone, I am looking for an EUROPEAN Portuguese YouTube channel similar to Ms Rachel. Tried searching for it but coming up short unfortunately. Can anyone recommend a channel that is educational / has the same setup as Ms Rachel? Brazilian Portuguese suggestions are also welcome but we live in Portugal so preferably European Portuguese. Thank you so much, this community has been so resourceful for raising our twins trilingual 😊

Hello everyone,

I would like some advice in regards to raising a multilingual child.

I am native in L1 and my husband is native in L2 which is also the community language.

My husband does not speak L1 and I am a beginner in L2, so we use L3 to communicate between us.

Right now, my baby is 2 months old and I speak to him in L1 while my husband and everyone else speak to him in L2.

We both occasionally speak to him in L3 but since I had been looking at OPOL method I am thinking that we should stick each to one language (L1 and L2).

As I use L3 at home to communicate to my husband, how should I go about it? Will it be really confusing for him, or will he also learn it from listening to us although we don’t directly speak to him in this language? (And he is likely to learn it later on as a subject in school). - introducing L1 is really important to me, so I wouldn’t compromise on it.

Also, I am a SAHM - in the future, should I be doing learning activities in L1? (Minority language).

Thanks a lot!

Hi all. I searched the sub but couldn't find much on this topic. I'm curious what has worked best in your families for when you have to be authoritative or discipline your kids.

Background :

I'm anglophone raising my 4 and 2 year Olds in France with my French partner. The 4 year old is in regular French school and the 2 year old goes to public crèche a few days a week. Our entire entourage is French though lots of friends and family speak English as well. Other than when my family visits (from Canada) I am the only native English speaker in my kids lives. I naturally default to English at home and we do a lot of English media that I loved as a kid. My eldest is very bilingual but as she is able to better express herself because of school, her French had surpassed her English.

The problem : my eldest is a handful. Very wilful and intense, and very badly behaved at home where we have been too permissive. She's good in structured environments like school. Trying to improve my parenting, I am tripping over my words. She seems to understand and respond best to the French phrases she hears at school. I wonder if I should stick with French for directions and discipline as a way to be more consistent. I have to say that coming up with the right way to phrase things in English is tough because we're not exposed to it. I have books of course (barenstain bears for example) but it's tripping me up. My daughter takes advantage of this too.

Anyway, any experience with this?

Hi everyone! I’m raising my almost 14mo to be bilingual, and I’d love some advice or reassurance about the best approach. I posted about this on other subs and received so many kind and useful responses, which helped a lot! But I wanted to ask everyone here too.

Here’s our situation:

-I mostly use English with him (90%) while my husband uses our local language, which I now know is considered OPOL. However, I’m not a native English speaker. I’m fluent and comfortable in English, but I worry if this could impact how I teach him to speak.

-He can follow easy commands in both languages like putting stuff in/out, turning on/off, open and close, up/down—but he only says a few words like mama, dada, hi, book , ball, car, star, pool (some of the words are pronounced not perfectly but close and we know he understands the meanings)

-We attend English-based activities like gym class, playgroup, and swimming, so he’s getting some exposure to English beyond me. Other than that, we mostly speak our local language when I talk to my husband or when we’re around family and friends.

-All our books, songs, and toys are in English, though I’ve recently started reading to him in our local language after getting advice to balance both languages.

-He’ll eventually attend an international school where English is the primary language.

I know bilingualism doesn’t cause language delays, and he seems to be developing typically. But I’d love advice on whether I should stick with OPOL, adjust my approach, or focus more on our local language for now since it’s what he hears most outside of our activities.

Any tips or insights would be much appreciated!

I have two children 1m and 4f. My husband speaks Sinhala (his first language) but is under confident in his abilities (he had parents who would speak it when furious so he sometimes says horrifically rude things without meaning it) while I can butcher my way through a conversation when necessary. My husband speaks a little Sinhala with the kids and I do what I can.

We have taken the kids to Sri Lanka and they participate in the community in our city, my daughter goes to Sinhala Sunday school and a Dhamma class at the temple in Sinhala but their Sinhala language exposure is definitely less than ideal for bilingual children.

Today while eating a nectarine at the playground my youngest ran away from me and I told him to sit down in Sinhala. The boy sat! I was so happy and surprised. His language has been slower to develop than his sisters, still comfortably meeting milestones and even saying some sentences here and there, and he understands everything in English, it’s cool to know he’s picking up both.

My kid is currently 18 months and looking to be a late talker. I am the only daily exposure for my relatively obscure native language. My parents and a cousin would be other sources but they would have to be via FaceTime since they don't live nearby. However, I don't think my kid understands the concept of this type of communication yet and just wants to play with the phone/tablet. For families that successfully used FaceTime or similar to increase exposure of target language, what age did you start? Any strategies for maximizing its utility? What is a good frequency and length of each session to aim for? Thanks for any tips!

We are raising our 20month old child multilingual out of necessity.

I’m Finnish, and my side of the family doesn’t speak any other languages. My husband is Spanish, and his family doesn’t speak any other language either. Therefore it is important, that our toddler is fluent at least in these two languages in order to communicate with his family. Between my husband and I, we speak English, but I have increased the amount of Spanish we speak (im fluent in Spanish too) and will likely drop English off completely for now. This is because I have read, that in recent studies it’s actually more beneficial for the child to have one dominant language and the rest of the languages will build on it. We have decided this will be Spanish, since I can speak it as well.

This is the tricky part. We have moved to Switzerland earlier this year and our toddler will be starting school here around 3-4year old. Me and my husband are currently learning German (which likely might confuse the child, since we obviously need to practice a lot with each other) but in our area most of the locals also speak Swiss German, which is surprisingly significantly different to German language. It is also extremely important that the child learns the local languages, since we are planning to stay here for the foreseeable future. So we are dealing with a child, who eventually has to manage Finnish, Spanish, English, Germans and Swiss German. I’m honestly nervous about how this will fold out.

Has anyone had experience with this kind of situation? When would you recommend to introduce the local language, so that they can integrate to the society and follow instructions in school?

Thanks!🙏🏻

My husband and I are both native English speakers but we lived in another country for many years. I became pretty good at the language but not fluent (enough to have a casual conversation though not at a super high level, not enough to get a job working fully in that language, can understand a lot of it, have a decent grasp on the grammar as I also studied it formally in school when I was younger) and my husband can understand some but doesn’t speak well at all. Also my accent is ok but not perfect, there are certain sounds in the language that are hard for me to pronounce like a native speaker. I’m pregnant and we would love our child to learn the language as much as possible. I know when trying to raise a child bilingual, it’s best practice for each Parent to only speak one language with the child - but

a) I assume this is meant for when the parent is fluent in the language they’re speaking and I’m not confident everything I say would be 100% correct in terms of grammar and vocab

b) I don’t want to only speak that language with them as it’s not my native language and it’s tiring and I want to be able to speak to my baby in English, plus she will inevitably hear my speaking English to everyone else

c) at a certain point I will be limited int the vocab and grammar I can use and she’ll probably plateau in the learning

Is it worth speaking the language with her sometimes? Playing songs in the language? Reading books in the language? Or will it just confuse her if I’m using two languages with her? Will it even be effective?

Hi all,

I've been a lurker for a bit, but I figured I would share my family's experience to get feedback.

I'm a native English speaker living in Poland - my wife speaks Polish. We do OPOL, and our oldest son (the only one talking much yet), seems to be behind in both language, at least to our observations. My son only speaks English at home to me. Or watches a lot of movies in English - he goes to school and his grandparents house where he just speak Polish.

But talking to my wife, it seems he's having some struggles in both languages. I went back to my home country a few months ago and visited friends and family who also have 5 year olds and listening to their kids, it seems my son is pretty behing In English. He messes up word order and struggles a decent amount with verb tenses.

My wife says the same thing with Polish. His grammar, while improving seems quite bad compared to his peers at school as well as pronunciation. He's actually going to speech therapy for Polish.

I just wanted to ask if some of this is normal for bilingual children at 5 years old? I feel being the foreigner here, I don't really have resources to talk to about this. Also, no offense to Poland, but I'm somewhat skeptical of the speech therapists here due to Poland not having a ton of experience with bilingual children in schools and whatnot - my kids here are viewed with a lot of interest due to bilingualism with kids being pretty uncommon. At least where we live.

Hi everyone! I’m curious as to what situations each of these two strategies you think is best suited for. Any thoughts are welcome!

We live in Poland, hubby’s first language is Polish, mine is English but I’m fluent in Polish almost just as much. We’re planning on sending LO to kindergarten/school that will have English as the main language (if it works out financially 🙈)

Recently LO has started babbling and I’ve been thinking about what multilingual parenting strategy would be best for us! So far (and this kind of evolved naturally) it’s been OPOL.

Hei 🌱 I have a 9 months old baby. I do OPOL with them in Italian, my first language. We live in Norway, I'm fluent in Norwegian and with my partner that's the language we use. Because of this I think my baby still gets more exposure from me to Norwegian than Italian.

Now we are in a situation where we have to move, and moving to Italy is also an option.

If we were to move to Italy we could easily to ML@H since I'm fluent in Norwegian.

My question is: is there an age range for my baby where it's the most beneficial to be in Italy to learn both languages? If not now, when would it be?

I may add that we are planning to home schooling.

My husband’s native language is Turkish. I am conversational and comfortable in Turkish, although I can express myself better in English (my first language). We are expecting our first child here in the US and we are both very focused on making sure they learn Turkish. We visit family in Turkey every year and nobody knows English - so it’ll be imperative!

Rather than OPOL, my husband and I were discussing what a golden opportunity we have to do MLAH… since I am totally game to do it in Turkish and my level is higher than average.

However, when chatting with a Turkish native speaking mom friend who does Turkish only at home with her husband, she mentioned it would be best if you speak your first language to your child to ensure a bond.

I don’t disagree completely - but I also don’t know for certain if MLAH could really be so poor for our bond unless my Turkish was pretty elementary. But she’s got me worried!

Do I really have something to worry about? Thanks in advance for any guidance and words of wisdom!

We are majority language English and minority Finnish with a 2.5yo. I’ve struggled to find Finnish books because, yay brexit, no bookshop will ship to the UK anymore, but we’re going to Finland next week and I’m planning a bookshop visit for sure. Our LO loves Julia Donaldson books that my husband has been reading to him, many of which have been translated into Finnish. Would it be useful to have his favourite books, like The Gruffalo, also in Finnish, or try to have different stories in each language?

My wife and I spent 6 years abroad and learnt Classical Arabic. We wanted to pass this on to our children so have only been speaking in Arabic with them since day one. They respond the majority of the time in English.

We have just come back from our 7 year old’s parents’ evening and are feeling really disheartened as the teacher has basically said he has graded/assessed her as “working towards expected target”, which basically means she is not meeting the targets they have set. And he explained that this is due to her lack of understanding a wide range of vocabulary. For example, she could not explain what the words in the sentence “the faint glow of light seeped through the seams of the door” means.

We thought we were giving our children a head start by trying to make them multilingual, now we are disappointed in ourselves and don’t know what to do going forward.

Would really appreciate any advice anyone may have.

Hi everyone, I am a native English speaker and am at a B2-C1 level proficiency in Spanish and am studying Korean currently. (I also am wanting to study Italian and German or Portuguese after I gain more fluency in Korean). My fiancé is Hispanic and isn’t as fluent in Spanish as me because his family mainly spoke in English as he was growing up (Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Guatemalan family).

For our (future) children, we want them to become multilingual in English, Spanish, and Korean. English is the majority language. Spanish because I have fallen in love with the language, and he has more connection to his Hispanic heritage due to his English and Spanish-speaking family members. Korean because my mother and grandmother immigrated from South Korea to the US in the 70s but did not pass down the language to me - thus why I’m studying it now.

However, I’m not sure how my fiancé and I should go about teaching our (future) children Spanish and Korean since I’m more fluent than him in the language, and it’s my second language and because I will not be as fluent in Korean, and he’s willing to learn more in Spanish and Korean, but obviously it takes time to learn languages. Thus, I’m not sure how to give our (future) children consistent interaction with these minority languages other than bilingual schools that exist in our area for Spanish/English immersion and Korean/English immersion. We would start their attendance in the Spanish/English school before kindergarten and start the Korean/English school when they’re 4 since the school starts at that age and is done every Saturday, so it wouldn’t interfere with the Spanish/English school during the week.

I want to also incorporate both Spanish and Korean in the home - more so than English - but don’t know how to do that since I won’t be as fluent in both of those languages as I am in English, and I’m not sure if my fiancé will have gotten to a good proficiency by the time we plan to have kids.

I know I just threw a lot at y’all, but does anyone have any tips or methods they’d like to share to help me feel like it is still possible for my fiancé and I to teach our future children more than 1 language?

Hello! I’m new to the group and now very knowledgeable yet on all the best practices…. I have a 1 year old baby and we live in Sweden, my husband and I speak English at home, and baby’s preschool is Swedish so she’ll definitely learn those two languages.

Question is, my husband and I are both half German and we speak German when we are with baby’s grandparents (every 1-2 months or so). It feels like a disservice not to try to teach her German as well, but what’s the best way to do that? German with the grandparents every now and then, and German cartoons when she’s older? Neither of us particularly love speaking German so it doesn’t come very naturally to us 😬 Any tips welcome!!

A little while I posted on here talking about how I want to teach my twin girls Afrikaans, but how I moved country and barely speak Afrikaans now.

I had a lot of encouragement from this post and people telling me to keep going! I've been making a real effort, but I need constant reminding to talk more.

Is anyone in the same situation and want to have a bit of an accountability buddy to message? I am here! 🫶🏻

I’m new to this sub, so I’m not versed in the research. Please tell me if this approach is sound. My wife speaks 5-6 languages, and I 1.5. My first language is English and my wife’s is Macedonian (her dialect, but she knows the standardized language too). I am learning Maceodnian and have a vocabulary of about 2000 words and growing. I also learned French growing up—enough to be able to get by. Knowing that multilingual exposure is good for an infant and that he will learn English just by existing in North America, I vowed to speak as much Macedonian as possible to our newborn. He’s now 2 months and I would say I use 60/40 Macedonian to English. My wife speaks roughly the same ratio, though she has her dialect mixed in which has some deviations from the standard. My worry is that I won’t be exposing him to the rich vocabulary that I would if I were to speak English all the time. I guess my question is: what is the right mix? Our goal is an orally bilingual son, but maybe that’s dreaming.

I speak 4 languages (French, Creole, Hindi and English) and my husband only speaks English. Our community language is also English as we live in the UK. I’ve decided to use the OPOL method as soon as baby is born where I exclusively speak to them in French and my husband speaks in English. I was hoping to start introducing the minority language Creole when they are a bit older (1 year?) by speaking to them in Creole when we are outside of the house

Will this strategy confuse the baby? I’m not worried at all about them picking up English but a bit worried about them picking up French/Creole. Any advice? :)

TIA!

So let me start off this by saying that our language is really really small. Basically we are only 2 million speakers in the world. We are now living in the country of this spoken language so my daughter (2,5 years old) is now going to daycare where they speak the language, people are speaking the language around her wherever we go, and I am speaking to her constantly in my language. My wife speaks English and our language at home is also English, but I always speak my language whenever I turn to my daughter. She's very attached to her mom and picks up a lot of English from her. We are planning to move to Canada next year, which means that my daughter will be around three years old when we move to an English speaking country with English speaking people around her, English relatives that are crazy about her which means a ton of interaction in English, English everything. I will absolutely be the only source of my tiny language to her. I’m afraid that me as the only source of my language will not be enough, and she will slowly lose my language overtime because everything around her will be in English almost 100% of the time. Are my fears substantiated or will I be enough for her to speak my tiny language when she’s older? I don’t need for her to learn it like I did in school with all the proper grammar, it will be enough if she is only able to communicate fully and understand everything. Right now she’s about 55:45 my language versus English, which is promising, but I still think that she will quickly lose my language after we move because English is such a giant language and we would live in English speaking country and I will just not be enough, especially if I get a job where I will be away from for most of the day. This fears are honestly consuming me and are ruining my happiness as I really really want her to speak my language. I had no idea before I met my wife that this will be such a big deal to me if we have a child but it is and I can't seem to ease my fears as I am unable to find exactly the same or very similar experience like I have and the child would turn out fine speaking the tiny language.

Thanks for all the replies!

I wanted to share with others how my parents raised me multilingual so that people who are going to raise children using the ML@H method will have a reference.

My parents are both from Mexico and I was born and I grew up in the United States. I was exposed to no English—only Spanish—until I was 9 years old. I only watched TV shows, listened to music and used the internet in Spanish. My home was English-free. I was homeschooled in Spanish and I was taught basic arithmetic, grammar, language arts, science & history in Spanish.

When I came to public school, I was in an ESL class because I did not know English. My parents encouraged me to make friends with Spanish speakers so that I would not need to use English outside the classroom. I was rewarded every time I made friends with a Spanish speaker. I would take all my notes in Spanish, and I would only study in Spanish. (No English was allowed in my house.) My parents also encouraged me to read stories in Spanish to keep my Spanish vocabulary and reading skills sharp.

The only time my parents would use English is when I got into trouble, which might have made me reluctant to use and learn English.

I would also go on two-month trips to Mexico with my family every summer and this kept my Spanish good. I did not speak any English in Mexico.

By high school, I became fluent in English but Spanish was still my dominant language. Little changed throughout and after high school and I am now fluent in both languages but stronger in Spanish.

Hi, I need some help.

My baby is 74 days old (2months and half) and I'm the main caregiver.

My native language is portuguese, my husband's native is arabic and our common language is english. I do not speak my husband's native (some words) and he doesn't speaks mine. We live in a arabic speaking country and my husband's family only speaks arabic and our plan is to keep living here. We see my husband's family every weekend.

My husband mostly speaks arabic to our baby, very rarely he speaks english. I only speak portuguese with the baby and sometimes I speak in english to include my husband. I sometimes mix english with the arabic words I know to include more of my husband's language.

Is there any chance my baby will struggle to learn arabic? What's the best way to follow?

Hello! I'm 8 months pregnant, and I really want my kid to be bilingual.

My husband and I are both Spanish native speakers, I'm fluent in English, our country is a Spanish speaking one. I want to introduce our child to English, however, my husband only speak Spanish, how do I go about it? Do I only speak English to him and my husband Spanish?

Please let me know best way to move forward. I'm currently reading "The Bilingual Edge" by Kendall King and Alison Mackey as well, but I thought if anyone had any anecdotical experience with something similar.

Thanks for reading.

Was not able to teach Italian to my two boys, 5 and 7yo. Always gotten a lot of pushback from both. Now my third child is born and working hard to get at least this last child to learn my language. I’m hoping if I get my youngest to learn Italian well the other two will tag along. We’ll see.

Wife only speaks English, environment is English.

It has been very hard 😕

Update 1 - thank you all for the feedback. Read some of the materials that were suggested and learned from the comments. Last night I warned the kids I would only speak Italian to them moving on. They both agreed, and this morning they’ve been very receptive. Will give an update a couple months down and let ya know how fast they assimilate it at 7 and 5yo. PS: so hard to speak Italian fluently while thinking in English 🤣