Location, location, location
My toddler officially registered for French preschool! On what happened, and what it reminded me about the "where" of bilingual parenting.
I signed my daughter up for la maternelle (obligatory French preschool) this week, prepared for disaster.
Ten years of fieldwork in France studying bilingualism, especially in its overseas departments like Guadeloupe will do that to you. I’ve sat in school meetings where heritage languages were immediately sidelined. I was once called by a prominent member of the French education department for what I was hoping was input on creating a richer Creole bilingual program, but what she actually asked me was, “Why are the children who speak Creole so bad at French?” (Yikes! And for the record, they’re not!)
I’ve watched parents code-switch their way through enrollment conversations, instinctively erasing the languages that live in their homes the moment they cross a school threshold. I know the research on what French schools do (and don’t do) for bilingual children. I’ve worked both in and inside the French school system, as a language assistant, teacher, and later, a researcher. I was braced.
And then, it went fine! More than fine, actually. The directrice asked about our family languages with genuine curiosity and support. Nobody told me that the Arabic would “confuse” her, or that I should focus on French “for now.” The directrice told several teachers as we were walking down the hallway “This little one speaks three languages!” My daughter was not immediately rebuffed at the sight of the “nap room.” We walked home feeling relieved.
Two big challenges: location and systems
In a chapter I’ve been working on for an academic volume on language and education, my co-author and I argue that France has developed a very specific relationship with multilingualism (one described as neoliberal multiculturalism). The term sounds academic, but the experience of it is very concrete. It looks like a school hallway decorated with flags from forty countries, and a curriculum that teaches exactly one second language which will bring the most economic prosperity to students (usually English).
What the research tells us: your environment does the heavy lifting
One of the most consistent findings in bilingualism research, and one I think gets dramatically undersold in the parenting conversation, is how much a child’s broader language environment shapes their outcomes, often more than anything happening inside the home.
Genesee & Crago (2021) note that children growing up in highly bilingual societies received more consistent language exposure across their daily environments and developed stronger proficiency in both languages as a result. Meanwhile, children in contexts where monolingualism is the social norm faced more pressure to assimilate toward the dominant language that even very intentional families struggle to counteract alone.
A child can have two deeply committed bilingual parents, a robust family language plan, and regular exposure to their target language at home and still drift toward the dominant language the moment school begins, if that school environment sends a consistent message that only some languages count.
Location isn’t just geography. It’s the sum total of social signals your child receives about whether their languages are valued. And for many of our children, especially those speaking a “historically minoritized” language that sum does not add up in their favor.
Which means the home is necessary, but not sufficient
The bilingual parenting conversation online tends to center very heavily on what you do at home: which strategies you use, how consistent you are, which books you read at bedtime, whether you follow OPOL or Time and Place or some hybrid that works for your particular chaos. (All very important!)
But the research is clear that what happens beyond your front door matters too. And unlike national language policy, there are things you can actually do in your local environment to shift the conditions around your child.
Two of them, specifically, have stood out in both my research and my own experience as a parent:
1. Find your people and make it regular-ish
Community bilingualism is one of the strongest buffers against linguistic assimilation. It doesn’t need to be daily, and it doesn’t need to be formal. Monthly meetups with other families who speak your target language, a WhatsApp group that becomes a park playdate, a grandparent on video call who simply exists in your child’s life as proof that this language has speakers, a future, a world attached to it. Research consistently shows that children who have regular contact with a community of speakers (not just their parents) internalize the language as something socially alive, not just something their family does. Two weeks ago, my daughter met a little boy in her gymnastics class that spoke English, and the experience has marked her so deeply that will call for me at 3 am just to remind me, “ILAN SPEAK ENGLISH MAMA!”
If no community exists where you are: you are allowed to build one. You are also allowed to look for bilingual families who don’t speak the same language as you, because the shared experience of raising a child in two languages creates its own solidarity.
2. Be the change inside the school
This one takes more energy, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s a bit of a pain! But it also has real, documented impact on both children and school culture.
What does it look like in practice? It can be as small as offering to come into your child’s class and read a story in your language. It can be proposing a culturally-themed activity, a recipe, a song. At Bilingues et Plus, our association, we’ve been running something called the Semaine des Langues: a week of workshops where parents come into schools to share writing systems, scripts, stories, and sounds in languages the children have never heard before. We’ve seen what happens when a child watches their teacher listen, genuinely, to their parents speak Arabic or Tagalog or Tamil.
So bottom line: do you need to move in order to “successfully” raise a bilingual child? No way! But you may need to put your heads together on how to bring your home language outside of the house.
Tell me more!