What If Only One Parent is Bilingual?

What if only one parent is bilingual? There is nothing wrong with having only one parent that is bilingual.  It’s probably the most common scenario now with mixed race families.  In my personal experience 99% of the people I know are married in mixed race families where one parent speaks Chinese and English and the other only speaks English.  There is nothing wrong and there shouldn’t be any stigma that the child should only speak one language or the other.  The child should be encouraged to speak both and/or taught both languages.  It would be most beneficial to the child if he/she learns both languages.  The child will learn much faster if at least one parent does speak the other language.

In my case, my husband speaks only English and I speak English and Chinese.  There are challenges of course to be the only Chinese speaking parent but I’m willing to take on the challenges to help my daughter learn the Chinese/Cantonese/Mandarin language.

Challenges in Being the Only Parent that is Bilingual

I’m sure you are already aware of the difficulties of being the only parent that is bilingual.  For me some of the challenges and difficulties are:

1. I’m not fluent in Chinese, so I can’t feed off of another person to get the right words
2. My daughter is not fully immersed in the language, she will sometimes get instructions or play in multiple languages
3. My husband won’t understand what we are playing so he cannot play with us in the same language
4. Sometimes I want to just play Chinese music or movies in the background to get a more Chinese language atmosphere that sometimes might annoy my husband

Advantages of Being the Only Parent that is Bilingual

There are many advantages of being the only parent that is bilingual.  Few of them listed here:

1. One being for sure that I can have a private conversation with my daughter
2. My daughter and I can play with each other and focus on one another through language
3. We can have our own singing time in Chinese
4. Another thing I noticed is that my husband has started picking up Chinese as well.  So a side benefit is that he’s starting to learn Chinese too.

Overall there are many challenges of learning a language and having a single parent that is bilingual is even more challenging.  With support and continuous repetition of words through singing and play, you child will start to develop and remember words.  It will be rewarding when they start to repeat the words back to you.  Patience and persistence is key in learning and teaching a new language.

Mommy dragon