Is bringing up a child bilingual beneficial or not?
Bilingual upbringing has been a huge point of concern and contemplation among caretakers when deciding how to bring up their children.
The short answer to this question however is that bilingual upbringing is in fact beneficial for a child’s development. The concerns arise from the fact that often due to the lack of proper testing and diagnosis, bilingual children are labelled as confused and short on their vocabulary, which is not the case.. Instead, the confusion and lack of vocabulary can be easily explained away and can actually be a symptom for excelled development.
Starting from the issue of code mixing in bilingual children, a phenomenon where a speaker mixes two or more languages together when communicating. This is something that even a lot of bilingual adults partake in, but when caretakers witness this behaviour in children it raises concerns of linguistic confusion and delays. The concerns are often further substantiated when professionals jump on board with learning delay claims. Often, however, these claims that bilingual children have learning delays are false and are a result of improper testing. There are very few professionals who have experience and training in assessing bilingual learning and similarly very few can carry out the testing in both/all languages that the child speaks, which leads to false results. In fact, code mixing is often a sign of copying others, seeing as often kids who are bilingual also live in a bilingual environment in which code mixing is common. Additionally, code mixing can arise during developmental stages of linguistic learning as kids lack vocabulary comparatively to later stages of language learning, therefore code mixing becomes a creative solution for communicating..
Code mixing often triggers worry in caretakers as they worry for the kids linguistic development and if in fact, see code mixing as a lack of vocabularic development. However, when compared to monolingual peers and their linguistic development, bilingual kids acquire the same number of words, but the only difference is that the vocabulary can be spread out across the languages, leaving the amount of words learned the same, comparatively.
This creative way of communicating, which due to misunderstanding and mislabelling of the linguistic acquisition process, results in quite a number of benefits that manifest in bilingual learners.
I have already covered the creative development, which has been seen to be higher in bilingual kids and could stem from their creative navigating of multiple languages to communicate in the most efficient way. Similarly, this phenomenon of code mixing results in better multitasking and memory scores, compared to monolingual peers. Additionally, due to the fact that children are having to learn multiple languages at once, with each language having its own unique social and cultural embodiment, this results in excelled social awareness, which tied to developed creativity makes bilingual children adapt in new and unique social environments a lot more efficiently and appropriately, compared to monolingual children.
The benefits listed above for bilingual upbringing can be easily proven and explained, however there are more benefits that are receiving more attention, but that need more investigating as the bilingual language development field is relatively new. Some studies have shown that bilingual children also score better in standardised testing as well as literary scores, in the long run. This would make sense if we were to look at the fact that creative activities for the brain increase its cognitive ability, which would lead to improved learning and scoring abilities.
Having studied bilingual upbringing in children and its effects on their future abilities, I am of the strong opinion that it is a socially and educationally beneficial way of bringing up kids. I, myself, am an anecdotal example of such upbringing and the benefits I have reaped from it both in my childhood and adulthood are endless.
A more accurate and helpful question is, how to raise a bilingual child in order for it to be beneficial.
Further reading:
The Bilingual Edge by Kendall King & Alison Mackey
A step-by-step guide for parents raising a bilingual child by Barbara Zurer Pearson
