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Notes -
Opol Ra
Or: Which way, Hapa parent?
I.
Have you guys ever heard of One Parent One Language? Basically, the idea is that if a parent speaks a second language that they want to pass down to their kids, they should speak to their kids solely in that language. So, for example, if you are a German/Spanish speaker and your wife is a French/Spanish speaker and you live in Spain, you speak to the kids only in German, your wife speaks to the kids only in French, and you and your wife speak Spanish to each other (and, of course, the kids learn Spanish in school). The ultimate goal is to have the kids be fluent in German and French as well as Spanish as adults.
Sounds simple enough, but there is a snag. How do you have conversations with the whole family? In the happy case, you and your wife speak, or at least understand, each others' second language (in our example, you also speak French and your wife also speaks German), and there's no problem: you understand what the kids say to your wife and she understands what the kids say to you.
However, that's rarely the case outside of highly polyglot areas of Europe (Switzerland?). In America, or at least my corner of it, the most common pairing that isn't two monoglots is an English monoglot and a diglot. So Father speaks to the kids in English and Mother speaks in, say, Mandarin, but Father can't speak a lick of Mandarin. This doesn't much matter when the kids are preverbal, but what is the future for such an OPOL family when the kids are old enough to have meaningful, grammatically complex conversations with a variety of vocabulary, spoken at normal adult velocity (or even faster, if passions are inflamed or someone is a naturally quick talker, or a mumbler)?
We can lay out a few possibilities:
A cursory perusal of threads about dinner table conversations on /r/oneparentonelanguage bears out that these options seem to be exhaustive. Tellingly, very few people discussing this problem have kids older than six or so; presumably the details of their life become too embarrassing to publicize or they compromise on OPOL.
II.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life. Mother addresses the kids or she addresses Father, but she does not ever address her children along with her husband. This seems to be just fine in the eyes of many women who I bin as "type A elder millenials" who seem to treat the kids as royalty and the husbands as the help. These women would trade off adult social cohesion in favor of a little more comprehensible language input for their kids all day every day. These are the women who, if their kids interrupt an adult conversation, tell the adults to wait while they talk to the kids.
A word about my own situation: my parents both speak English and Russian, which I and my siblings all learned since Russian was all we spoke at home. My sister married a man who doesn't speak Russian and had kids, and I married a woman who doesn't speak Russian either. Any time we're together and I say something in English for the benefit of all the adults present ("should we think about lunch?"), my sister badgers me about saying it in Russian unless I was specifically addressing someone who doesn't understand Russian. Meanwhile, her husband's Russian skills have been eclipsed by his kids, and I don't think he's ever going to catch up, so option 1 and 2 are basically off the table. The only remaining question is how far down the list the family is going to end up. I've seen Chinese/American couples where the parents bring kids to the park and the Chinese wife finds other Chinese women and chats with them in Chinese while the husband looks off into space (they are also doing OPOL). I expect we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future and I don't think it's going to be pretty to see the products of marriages like this. The /r/aznmasculinity poster problem is only the beginning.
III.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense? Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk, and my sister has never brought them up. The arguments I've seen are:
The base rates for language retention in second generation speakers (besides Spanish) in the US are quite poor. The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit. The odds of their kids speaking your language, even if it's Spanish, are effectively zero. Is it really worth splitting your family for this?
I think any reasonable person has to say no. I knew that marrying my wife meant that the odds our kids speak Russian is basically zero (at the time I didn't consider the simple solution of alienating my wife to pass on the language). If I wanted my kids to speak Russian, I should have married a Russian. If my parents wanted my kids to speak Russian, they should have stayed in Russia. This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish. You don't get both the freedom to come to this country, love a woman from a background different than yours, marry her, and start a family AND somehow pass on your idiosyncratic foreign background without compromising the relationship that is the bedrock of the family, namely, that between the wife and the husband. And I think that's basically as it should be.
I think you (and apparently a lot of OPOL devotees) are overthinking it.
The research does generally support OPOL theory, in terms of being the most effective way to raise bilingual children. But it is not the only way. The idea that "Mom speaks to the kids in English, Dad speaks to the kids in Russian" is well and good, but it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.
I don't know how strong the evidence is for "cognitive benefits" of multilingualism (though I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to believe it) but I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.
I'm rather skeptical of the claimed cognitive benefits. Much like learning a musical instrument, it seems like more of a proxy for having highly motivated, involved parents who are providing general intellectual enrichment. It's quite difficult to separate out the effect of a specific activity.
Some of my cousins live in Canada, and there it is also subject to an interesting selection effect. French immersion programs are, on paper, intended to make more Canadian students able to communicate in both official languages. In practice, it's how the upper-middle class gets their kids placed in better public schools. Generally ESL students are not eligible for French immersion, since they are receiving supplemental English lessons. This makes the pool of French immersion students significantly higher SES and less "diverse".
Yeah I live in a country with very high multilingualism rates and there are plenty of people I know who speak 3 or 4 languages that I wouldn't exactly call Intellectual Titans otherwise. IMO it's really down to neuroplasticity when the languages get picked up, and I'm also probably overestimating how good they are at their non-primary languages since I don't think they'd be capable of writing a dissertation in them even if they can get by colloquially.
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That's not the salient question. The question is how Mom and Dad have a conversation with each other and the kids at the same time. Clearly such conversations are a significant fraction of language use in the home and having these conversations in English is compromising on the amount of language practice that the kids get, as well as encouraging the kids to be lazy in talking to Mom in Russian. There's no free lunch here.
UMC children of immigrants who grew up in a weird halfway culture and never developed their identity as Americans hold all kinds of regrets about their parents. They forced them to learn an instrument, or they didn't send them to music classes, or they didn't teach them their native language (despite fighting tooth and nail as children to speak English), or they taught them their native language but they didn't pass down the secret cooking techniques, or they taught them the native language and passed down the secret cooking techniques but didn't cultivate a relationship with the extended family, etc etc. These are mostly window dressing around the anomie of not fitting in.
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