'I was terrified she'd stop talking': How to make your German child bilingual

Jarvis Cocker (British pop star and cultural icon) has a nice line about adopting an attitude of “benign neglect” in his approach to parenting. Jarvis is a legend, and I'll happily follow his advice in most things, but hard-won experience suggests that a slightly more structured approach is helpful when it comes to raising bilingual children.

My children are 13 and 10. Both were born in Berlin and have been raised here by an English father (me) and a German mother. Both of them are more eloquent in German than they are in English, but both feel equally at home in either language – whether that means speaking, reading, or writing.

As an English-speaking parent in Germany, I know I’m in a relatively privileged position compared with friends whose native languages range from Swedish to Hebrew to Swahili, but it’s still far from a straightforward process. This is what I’ve learned.

Agree on a consistent approach – and stick to it!

Parenting books love praising the benefits of consistency – especially when it comes to language acquisition. When my daughter was born, I had spent the previous three years learning German. Proud of myself, I talked to her in a mix of German and English – until my wife pointed out how insane it was to try and impress a baby who still didn’t know what a face was. We decided it would be best – for everyone’s sake – if my wife and I both stuck to our native languages as much as possible.  

Later, my wife asked me to pretend I couldn’t understand German so that my daughter would be forced to speak in English. I’m a complete wimp, however. The idea of forcing my tiny girl to do anything seemed outrageous. I was also terrified she might stop talking to me altogether. My third argument, the only one which cut any ice with my wife, was that I didn’t want to risk making English feel like a chore or a problem for our daughter.

Today, my wife still thinks a little tough love in the early days would have paid dividends. She may be right. It’s true that our children both speak better German than English – but I’ve also spent enough time with myself to know I wouldn’t have been able to enforce the rule consistently. I’m convinced it was better for everyone involved to let the children speak in whichever language they preferred, rather than keep changing the rules on them, based on how weak or strong I was feeling that day.

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Force your children speak your language

This may sound counter-intuitive, but bear with me. I was too much of a softie to stop my children from talking to me in German; that doesn’t mean I was above engineering situations which would force them to speak English.

One of the strangest aspects of raising children in a foreign country is that you become almost the sole conduit by which they absorb your (their?) language and culture - a fact brought home to me with startling clarity on the day my daughter spoke her first complete English sentence (at about two and a half). My wife and I were sitting in the kitchen. Our daughter walked into the bathroom next door. The floor was wet. “Fuck,” we heard her shout, “my fucking socks are soaking.”

There was absolutely no one else I could blame for this outburst. If our daughter had said the same sentence in German, my wife could have pointed the finger at a dozen potential culprits. I realised I needed to put more effort into finding people with whom I could “share responsibility.”

READ ALSO: 'Multilingualism is an enrichment, not a deficit'

At home, we stopped watching Peppa Wutz and started watching Peppa Pig. I spent more time reading to my children. Above all, I made more of an effort to visit friends and family in the UK and to encourage them to visit us in Berlin. I started policing the language people used around my children, insisting that English-speakers talk to them in English.

I found it bizarre how many people tried to talk to them in German – including my father, who developed a weird habit of addressing his grandchildren in his version of a German accent (the evil Nazi kind, from old black and white movies), which inevitably reduced my infant son to tears.

Then Covid struck. My son had just turned five. As a family, we couldn’t travel to the UK for the next two years. Both my children stopped speaking English almost completely. When restrictions on travel were finally lifted, we celebrated with a big, extended-family holiday. The first few days were a nightmare; a group of ten cousins all chatting together – and my two unable to join in.

But the penny dropped for both of them that speaking English was a necessity, not a luxury. When we got home, my daughter (who was nine at the time) carried on talking to me in English. My son copied his older sister as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Neither of them has ever looked back.

Be grateful your native language is English

Physically, I may have been the only person teaching my children for much of the time, but I was never really alone. I had Peppa Pig to help me, followed by Harry Potter, and then Taylor Swift. At a certain point in time, speaking English went from being something which made my kids feel weird, to being something which made them feel cool.

Neither of them enjoy their English lessons at school – they find them deathly boring, and object to being used as human dictionaries – but the lessons take a lot of the pressure off me, particularly when it comes to writing, grammar, and punctuation.  

Be patient

My father is fond of saying that “perfect is the enemy of good.” Being raised in multiple languages and cultures is an enormous privilege, but it also throws up challenges for children. Evidence suggests that children raised in bilingual families start talking later, so be patient. And don’t forget that half of communication is context. When my children visit their cousins in the U.K., there are in-jokes, references, and bits of slang which they simply can’t follow. 

There are also numerous small cultural differences, which they need time to learn how to navigate. In England, my children occasionally come across as blunt and ungrateful. In Germany, they sometimes seem excessively keen to avoid giving offence (because they say sorry all the time, for example, avoid the word “no”, and smile more often than other children).

Mastering a language means mastering a culture, in other words. It’s occasionally frustrating and it undoubtedly takes time and effort – but the potential benefits are enormous.

Have you managed to ensure your children are bilingual? Share any tips for how you did it.