Does your child sign in French?

As the mother of triplets, I belong to a bunch of different elists for the exchange of information about raising multiples. One particularly active list is the MMOTC - the Manhattan Mothers of Twins Club (http://www.manhattantwinsclub.com/) A recent thread in the discussion had to do with one mother being made to feel as if she were not doing enough for her children because she hadn't been taking them to language classes. The other mother (of a singleton I might add) said that her little one was three and already spoke three languages and was signing. This woman posted to the group to see if she was ready to be reported to child protective services for not giving her children language lessons. I was pleased to see that the group was very supportive of her; they said that every family has their own priorities and values and she should go with what she feels. As a Linguistic Anthropologist, I had to add my two cents to the discussion. Here is what I said...

"Yes, the best time to teach a child multiple languages is when they are learning the first one. However, given the risk of language acquisition delay in multiples, partially because of the development of their own “twin” language which is not well understood although well documented, I think trying to teach them multiple languages when you are not multi-lingual at home is playing with fire. All the studies say that children raised in multilingual environments have some language delay but they catch up by school age, speaking both languages fluently. If you add that to the risk of language delay found in multiples to begin with and the competitive nature of schools in NYC, this is just creating a problem where there does not need to be one. In the US, we are so English-oriented that there is no reason to feel that your children will be disadvantaged if they do not speak three languages by the time they hit first grade. You can enrich them with music, art, swimming and interpersonal skills without messing around with their first language acquisition task. So, I am not taking my girls to French class and they are not even going to watch Maya y Miguel. If you do speak more than one language at home, I would say do not change your pattern. Learning more than one “mother tongue” is great. However, without the children being multiples, you would expect there to be a language delay when there is more than one language in the home. This is perfectly ok but you have to be prepared for it. They sort of speak the languages together for a while and then all of a sudden they differentiate the languages and speak grammatically in both. It is an amazing process that is imperfectly understood. The good news is that their brains know what they are doing so you don’t really have to do anything but watch in amazement. However, you can’t expect them to be totally on target for language development. When they are tested, you need to let them know that another language is being spoken at home. If they say it has no impact on language acquisition, take them elsewhere. The people doing the test do not know what they are doing. "

I got several private emails thanking me for my response but one mom was still concerned because she was speaking English, her nanny was speaking Spanish and they had taught the twins Baby Sign Language. I guess I needed to allay her fears that like the rest of us she had done something to damage her children. This is my summary -

"This is what we know for sure:-
Children are wired at birth to learn languages - any and all human languages-
Deaf children if not taught sign language will develop their own-
Multiple birth children will develop a means of communicating amongst themselves even before they acquire the adult languages.
Multiple languages spoken in the home delay full language acquisition of all the languages but it happens eventually and fully in each of the languages.
There is no definitive research that says one way or another about the mix.

I think that language lessons to teach small children are not necessary and bordering on counterproductive. If you aren't speaking the language in the home, then it is not developing first language acquisition the way the children are wired to do so. There are different processes at work when you learn your first language(s) and subsequent languages. That is one of the reasons why it is harder for adults to learn a language. (There are others) Language lessons to small children use the second language acquisition paradigm and that to me is not what you need to do to help your kids.
If our babies were developing 50 -60 -70 years ago, I wouldn't think this would be an issue - if a kid didn't talk until s/he was 3, they would have thought that s/he was just quiet. Now, everyone is tested, tested, tested and the competition to get into pre-school is great. Yes, there are a great many things that are caught early which is wonderful. However, the competition makes any delay in anything, even if it is within normal range but at an extreme will put the children at a disadvantage. Many of our (multiple birth) children were premature putting them at risk for delays to begin with. In addition, the nature of the multiple sibling relationship gives them the opportunity to develop their own sign language and spoken language which do not get counted in the testing except as a negative. It is for these reasons that I am not and will not give my girls language lessons until they have reached school age.That being said, I do wish that we spoke another language in our house."