
This is perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing multi-cultural couples living abroad and is something that I am experiencing first hand as a father and husband. My wife is Japanese and we are raising my two year old daughter here in Tokyo.
My wife and me both work full time so our daughter goes to nursery school every day and when she is there she plays with the teachers and her friends and has a great time. The nursery school is a Japanese school and so naturally most of the kids are native Japanese, which means they speak Japanese all day.
At home I speak English 100% and my wife speaks both English and Japanese but mainly Japanese. If I speak to my daughter I speak English and she understands. However, she usually replies in Japanese. We get some strange looks on the train when people see this! Occasionally, when my daughter is in a really good mood she will reply in English and when she does it really makes my day.
I read somewhere that it does not really matter what language the parents speak or what they do to try to make their children speak a certain language. It said that if a child has friends who speak a certain language then the child will naturally want to speak in that language. We humans are social creatures and we all want to fit in with the people around us, apparently this is also true for very young children like my daughter.
So as a parent my challenge is to find what I can do to give her a head-start in English when she wants to speak Japanese because all her friends speak Japanese?