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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.
The simple solution to multi language social spaces is that in any shared space where there is the potential for a person who doesn't know language X, you speak the universal language regardless of if they are there or not.
The idea that one wants to teach the kids a different language is fine. Teach them. But as soon as it starts creeping into situations where not everyone can understand you have a discipline problem. No swearing at the TV in Russian and no Chinese in the kitchen!
The problem of doing things this way is that the parents actually have to take responsibility. It's much easier to not have to put in effort, and just talk to your kids in this language whilst the other parent does it in another, rather than actively sitting your kids down every evening and doing some genuine teaching. But it's a recipe for negative social structures within the home, like you overview.
All in all it's a problem of low agency parenting in a low stakes environment. To veer slightly off topic:
Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why. You hit on this in portion III. It becomes harder and harder to justify teaching your kids a language or otherwise doing hard things when in practicality it is only used to impress grandma and grandpa, who might quickly turn to the universal language when they hear how poorly their studies have been going. There are no real stakes, no weight. This is because fundamentally there's no vision for the future. The kids don't actually have a purpose. The family doesn't exist in a serious context.
People like to blame the 'economy' for the downwardly mobile, but it's practically always the parents that failed. They were disinterested in securing a prosperous future for their children because they themselves are not serious. There's no identity, no ego, no belief, no nation and no border. It's all up in the air, to be discarded at whatever convenience.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with you there. They maybe can't exactly articulate it, but I think the fundamental reason, at least in the circles I'm in, is status. Very original take, I know. But the fact is that having multilingual kids "in touch with their culture" is high status among the generation having and raising kids today (I'm thinking basically people in their 30s and early 40s).
Same goes for perfect pitch. Are they ever going to need it? Maybe not, but it impresses others (and it preserves some optionality, what if Sally does want to become a musician after all? Of course, it would be better for her to be a surgeon). It's not just Grandma and Grampa that are being impressed, it's also your friends with kids, with whom you (as a mother) are trapped in a bitter status war in which quarter is neither asked for nor given. It's absolutely critical that you have the most well rounded little angels in the mom group. Husbands are typically dragged along and are happy to just grill.
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