Bonus 20: Bringing up bilingual babies

For many people in the world, raising kids who are bilingual or multilingual is the norm - it's the only way to navigate life. For others, especially in predominantly English-speaking areas, it's a conscious decision made for one of many different reasons. 

In this bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, Gretchen and Lauren take you through several ways to raise children who speak more than one language: the one-parent, one language method, immersion schools, and speaking different languages at home and in the public sphere. We also talk about the psychological aspect: what do you do when a slightly-older kid starts trying to get their parents to speak the dominant societal language instead of the carefully-cultivated minority one?  

Bilingualism in a monolingual society can be challenging, but the rewards are great. As Gareth Roberts said recently on twitter, "The evidence for bilingualism having cognitive benefits beyond the ability to speak another language is very poor, but I'll tell you this: I've never ever met anyone who regretted being bilingual. I've met many people, however, who regret that they're not." 

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We also discuss the upcoming live shows in Melbourne and Sydney in November. Patrons, if you're in the area, make sure to claim your two free tickets here! For extra tickets, you can send your friends to our EventBrite for the Melbourne show and the Giant Dwarf website for the Sydney show.  

We're heading into our second anniversary, which is super exciting! Last year, for our first anniversary, we asked all our listeners to help more people find the show, and it was a tremendous success! We were able to thank almost 100 people by name on our anniversary post, and this year we're aiming to thank even more! 

Obviously, as patrons, you already do a bunch to support the show, so if you want to just rest on your laurels that's also totally fine, but we wanted to let you know about this because more listeners also means more potential patrons, so recommending the show would help you get those special video episode goals sooner. Podcasts are still mostly found through word of mouth, so you'd also be doing a favour to all those people who would totally enjoy a fun, in-depth conversation with real linguists but just don't know where to get it yet! 

We'll be putting up an easily shareable post soon, but if you want to get a jump start on recommending Lingthusiasm, you can tag us as @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Instagram so we can find you to include you in the anniversary post! We're also very happy to be recommended in blog posts or on other podcasts - just put up a link to the post/episode on one of these social networks and tag us! 

Links:

• Live show details!
• Live show tickets for Patrons! 
• We're trying to thank MORE people than our 1 year anniversary recommend-a-thon 
• Lingthusiasm episode 12: Sounds you can't hear 
• Gareth Roberts quote (via Twitter)
• Gretchen livetweeted a talk about raising multilingual kids at LangFest18

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript is available for this episode as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page.

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All ThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are Emily Gref and A.E. Prevost, our production assistant is Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.