Title: 
Raising Bilingual Children: The Most Successful Methods

Word Count:
736

Summary:
As the saying goes, there are many ways to skin a cat, and so there are a multitude of strategies for raising bilingual children. Among all these choices, one thing remains constant -- a children’s love for predictability.


Keywords:
Bilingual children, bilingual child, bilingual families, bilingual family, multilingual children, multilingual child, multilingual families, multilingual family


Article Body:
As the saying goes, there are many ways to skin a cat, and so there are a multitude of strategies for raising bilingual children. Among all these choices, one thing remains constant -- a children’s love for predictability. 

Have you ever noticed how poorly many children handle change and how they thrive when on familiar turf? When you’ve read that same story every night for two months, you’ll know what I mean. Certainly, kids learn languages under the most chaotic conditions -- just look at the average dinner table scene -- but some predictability within the chaos spells safety and security, which in turn promotes learning. 

Most multilingual families have discovered that a fixed language system in the home greatly reduces the tendency for children to mix the languages -- or worse, the flat-out refusal to speak the second language. One parent expressed it perfectly; “I’ve noticed that when Anna gets overwhelmed by something, she just tunes out. I guess that it is the toddler safety mechanism against information overload.” Kees van der Laan continued, “But I really don’t want her to tune out my Dutch, so my wife and I agreed on a language combination that we can both live by, while keeping it simple for Anna. I feel that the consistency is ultimately more important than which kind of system we use.” In choosing your system, you’ll absolutely need to consider what will work best for your family, but here are the two most popular methods:

1) One Person, One Language (OPOL) is the most common family language system in use. For instance, Kees speaks his native Dutch, while his wife speaks English. Each parent or caregiver consistently speaks only one language to the child. Sometimes OPOL requires extra "language supplements,” such as playgroups, visits from family, a trip to the country, or a native speaking nanny or au-pair. It helps tremendously for your child to hear that his parent isn’t the only one who speaks this language. Kids are savvy little creatures who are quite capable of reasoning that they don’t really need to know a language if it is only spoken by one other person.

2) A second option, slightly less common but tremendously successful is Minority Language at Home (ML@H)ML@HML@H