Language classes and friendships

Every Sunday my children attend Farsi language lessons. Although they are only 4 and 6, we thought it would be a good idea to immerse them in the language and culture of Iran for a few hours once a week. Apart from teaching Farsi, the school also offers music lessons, and events are organised to coincide with Iranian festivities. So, it's an excellent place to get to know a bit more about the country and also to meet other Iranians, and make a few new friends. And of course, my daughters have made quite a few friends at the school.  

Last Sunday, as I was leaving the school, I heard my girls chatting away to their friends in English. Now, this is not new to me. I've noticed that most children speak Farsi during the lesson, but as soon as they step out of the room, it's English all the way. English with their parents, English among themselves and they even try and speak English to their teacher, who then in turn lectures us parents about speaking Farsi at home to the children.

What was different this week was that as we left the school, our girls started to speak English to us as well. I was amazed. We take them there to learn Farsi, and they are actually picking up their friends' habit of speaking English to their parents! This made me reflect on the power of friendships and peer pressure in general.

As a parent, it's so hard to compete with peer pressure; I've often observed how my little girls, who are typically very good on the road, completely loose it and run in the middle of the road after their friends. This paralyses me, not only because of the immediate danger, but because of what I fear they will be like as teenagers, when my opinion will matter so much less than their friends'.

Stuttering and multilingualism

Lately I've come across several discussions about stuttering in multilingual children, for example on the Multilingual Children's Association forum and on the babycentre groups. Having read some of the posts, I started reflecting on my own experience.

My children don't stutter.  However, my youngest daughter often struggles to find the right word in one of her minority languages, and then to take time to think about what she wants to say she 'ums and errs'. When she was younger, I used to find this worrying, even frustrating at times, but then I gradually came to accept it, and rarely ever think of it. After reading the discussions I mentioned above however, and reflecting on how she talks, I realized how determined she is to get it right. She tries very hard to stick to one language only and not bring in any English words, and that's some amazing determination for a 4 year old.

So, it's quite natural for our trilingual children to 'um and err', but what about if your child stutters? The British Stammering Association has a page dedicated to stammering in under 5s, and stammering in bilingual children is also discussed. It is a leaflet that was produced in 2003, which mentions how 'there is no evidence that learning more than one language causes stammering'. However, in 2008 a study was published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, relating to research carried out at University College London. In the study, the authors examined 317 children who stuttered, including bilingual and monolingual children. The researchers concluded that bilingual children are more likely to stutter.
While this is an interesting piece of research in an area that has not been researched extensively, the sample was really small. Also, other factors that could affect the children's speech development were not assess in the article, for example the socioeconomic background of the family, the level of education of the parents, parents' age etc.

My conclusion is that if a multilingual child stutters, rather than reverting to monolingualism, one should seek the help of a trained professional, and hopefully one that is equipped to dealing with a multilingual individual.

Separation anxiety

Over the past couple of months, my daughter Millie has been really struggling with separation anxiety. When I would take her to the nursery, she would try to 'superglue' herself to me, and when I went to leave, she would run after me. A few weeks ago, her key person had to pin her to the floor to make sure that she wouldn't run out of the room.

As I left the nursery, I could hear her screams from the street and once again I went to work with tears in my eyes, and feeling incredibly guilty. So, I did some research online, trying to find out what other parents in my situation have done, and I came up with a plan.

Firstly, I started asking the nursery staff what activities they had planned for the following day. I would discuss this with Millie, until she was feeling quite excited to be going back to nursery the day after.

Secondly, I brought in a photograph of our family that Millie could keep in her tray and she could go back and hold or kiss whenever she missed us.

And lastly, I bought a couple of books - my solution to any of my problems is usually a book!

But this time I found one that must have been magic, because my daughter has responded to it so well and so quickly. The book is Kissing Hand although I also bought I Love You All Day Long.

I Love You All Day Long is a really sweet book telling the story of a little pig called Owen. He's anxious about going to school, but his mum tells him that she loves him all day long, whether they are together or not. And although this is a really good book, Kissing Hand is the one that did the magic for us.

In it, a raccoon called Chester is anxious about going to school on his first day (or night in Chester's case) and mum eventually comes up with the idea of kissing his hand, and he can put his hand to his face anytime during the day, whenever he needs it, and his mum's kiss will be there for him. The kisses don't even wash off!

Millie really enjoyed reading the book, and was very happy to try the "kissing hand". And within two days she seemed to overcome her separation anxiety! It was so quick and impressive, that I overheard the nursery staff are recommending the book to other parents. What an amazing story....      

A little entrepenuer

This weekend, my six-year-old daughter has been making paper airplanes and selling them. What has this to do with bringing up a trilingual family, I hear you say. Nothing, but I just can't get over the fact that a little child of 6 thought that people would buy one of her paper airplanes, which consists of a white piece of paper folded a couple of times, with no decorations what-so-ever on it, and which really doesn't even fly very far!

When she told me her money-making plan, I suggested that she sells to family and friends, who would be more than happy to support her in her first commercial venture and would certainly buy a few of her creations. I told her that Iranians and Italians just love paper airplanes and they would certainly buy from her. But that was not good enough, she wanted to sell to strangers. And she tried selling at her dance class, but unfortunately nobody bought anything from her.

I must admit that I really admire her determination and courage, but I was also worried that she might be disappointed. She didn't seem to mind though, kept positive, and approached a few of our family members and friends. In the end, she made about £10, which is not bad for pocket money. I just wish I had more friends, or I could set up a few strangers to buy from her, so to build her confidence even more.

And I do hope that she can keep her positive and determined attitude for years to come, and life doesn't dampen her spirits.

Do your children speak like mum or dad?

I just read a really interesting post on the Being Multilingual blog titled Speaking lime mummy, and speaking like daddy. The blogger, Madalena, observed that her children speak mummy's language like mummy, and daddy's language like daddy.

I thought this was quite interesting because just a few days ago I was thinking that my daughter speaks Farsi 'like a boy'. What does this mean? It's not simple to describe what I mean, but some of the words that she uses are more boy words, if I can call them that. And Iranian women normally are quite lady-like in the way that they express themselves. They will say words like 'my darling', 'my dear' (not to be interpreted in the same way as their English translation), 'sweety' and generally they really do use different language than Iranian men.

I never thought of how to tackle this, or even if it is something to be tackled, but I'd love to hear if other people have encountered the same phenomenon when raising their children.
Please, leave me a message if you have, or if you have not but you have an opinion about it. And I'd love to know whether people think this is something that should be tackled, and how, or if they think that the children will eventually change the way the speak, or if it doesn't really matter either way!

Holidays in Italy

Today I am blogging from a lovely little town in northern Italy, located in the countryside not far from Venice, and a 15 minutes drive from the beach. My kids are having the time of their lives. They sleep late every morning, and visit the beach late afternoons when the sun is not too hot, and the sea breeze is such a relief after a day of sweltering heat. During the warm Summer evenings, we visit relatives and friends, eat lovely fresh food and delicious ice-cream.

But for me this is not a time to relax. This is when I get to see if our efforts of raising our children trilingual is actually paying off. Our neighbor in Italy has a 6 years old daughter, same age as my eldest, and so I'm very interested to see how their language skills compare.

This is not an easy task, I find. My trilingual children certainly speak with an 'interesting' accent, and their sentence construction is even more 'interesting', making it very clear that English is their strongest language. But more importantly, in England children start school at the age of 4, while in Italy (like many other countries) they start at 6. The result is that while my eldest is able to write and read in English, read in Italian and has started reading and writing in Farsi, our neighbor's daughter hasn't even started school!

It is also interesting to see my children interact with my relatives in Italy. Initially, I think they were considered a bit of an oddity, with their accents and their constant grammatical mistakes, but within a few days they have become part of the extended family and their Italian is already improving. 

One thing I can be sure of: even if they don't speak perfectly, they would soon pick up the accent and correct grammar if they needed to. So it remains for me to decide: does this mean that my job is done?

I'm special because I'm trilingual

At the end of the school year, my daughter brought home some of her school work. For religious education, she was asked to write why she's special. Like any mother, I read with interest, in the hope of discovering something that I don't already know about her, something that she values about herself. And under the title "I am special because...", she wrote: "I speak English, Italian and Farsi".

How fabulous!!

How can I describe how I felt when I read this! All the effort that we made to bring her up trilingual, all the conversations often interrupted to make sure that she speaks in the correct language, all the nagging to speak Italian, not to mix her three languages, and suddenly it was all worth it. She demonstrated not only awareness of being trilingual, but also showed to value her trilingualism. And I guess in some sense this also means that she values the three different cultures that she is exposed to every day.

Thinking back to when she was a toddler and started speaking, we initially struggled to help her stick to one language. She'd come home from nursery and ask for 'water' instead of 'acqua' and we would ask her to speak only Italian. But what does this mean to a two-year-old? What is Italian?
Understandably, she didn't get it and we struggled to make her see what we meant. Until one day my husband came up with an idea. Instead of asking her to speak a certain language, he would ask her to please speak like mum and not like Karen (her carer at nursery), and that made sense to her!

Six years on, and I still ask her to speak like me or her dad, rather than a specific language. One of the reasons for this is that I don't want to create a sense that I prefer Italian over English or Farsi, and I don't want her to end up disliking Italian because of my persistent interference. Rather, I'm trying to create a connection between the language and her mum, in the hope that this contributes to her sense of identity. And it seems that this approach might be working....