Will my children speak the same language that I do? (Part Two)

My daughter is almost one-and-a-half years old now, and while it seems like her adventure with language is just beginning, science now tells us that children begin learning to differentiate the sounds of languages and voices before they are even born.

My son, who is almost four, is already a very active bilingual language speaker, so you may wonder why I worry about whether my daughter will learn to speak English like my son has. Well, I worry about it because all children are different, and because many younger children in bilingual homes don’t develop the same language skills as their older siblings. There are many reasons for this I’m sure, but the reason that seems most apparent to me at this point in my daughter’s life is the scarcity of time.

Time is a resource of limited quantity, and the more children there are in your household, the less time you will have for each child. Before my son was born, I spoke to him through my wife’s belly every night and sang him songs. After he was born, I held him every day, speaking to him all the while. I sang him to sleep almost every night. I read books to him from a very early age and took him on daily walks. I bathed him most evenings and practiced the ABCs with him while we played in the bath. I spent over two months raising him by myself during a time in which my wife was hospitalized for being at an elevated risk of going into premature labor. In short, I was able to spend an enormous amount of time speaking to my son, playing with him, and bonding with him.

Before my daughter was born, I rarely spoke to her through my wife’s belly. I was too busy putting my son to sleep and often falling asleep with him. Before my daughter was born, I lost two and half months with her because she and my wife were in the hospital. After she was born, the time I have had with her has been, at best, split in half with my son, so her exposure to my English has been reduced by, at the very least, half.

Many experts say that a child must be exposed to a second language for between thirty and fifty percent of their waking time if they are going to become fluent in that language (about twenty-five hours a week). At the moment, I don’t know if I am meeting that requirement with my daughter or not. With my son fighting for my attention on a day-to-day basis, I often wonder how I am going to expose my daughter to this much English. It is my hope that exposing her to the conversations my son and I have, and including her in these conversations will make up for her lost one-on-one conversation time with me.

But will it be enough? I don’t know. I plan to give you updates as her language skills develop.