Challenges facing bilingual families: misconceptions and facts about the effects of simultaneous bilingualism on children and families

Abstract

Myths and misconceptions about childhood bilingualism are still part of today’s world. Thereis a belief, for example, that bilingual children are unnecessarily burdened with two languages,which in turn negatively affects their speech and language development, or another commonlyaccepted belief that “complicated“ life in bilingual families differs a great deal from the lifein monolingual families. Childhood bilingualism has been considered from the perspectiveof linguistics and medicine mostly and less from the perspective of educational sciences. Thisclaim is well supported by the lack of pedagogical literature discussing the matter. Therefore,challenges of bilingualism facing parenthood and upbringing become the focus of this paper,with special emphasis being placed on simultaneous bilingualism and one of the most commonparental strategies in early bilingual acquisition – one parent-one language approach. Exploringthe parental endeavour to accomplish their double role – that of a parent and language teacher– while at the same time they try to resist the challenges of everyday bilingual life, commonparental concerns and negative effects of simultaneous bilingualism, this paper aims to provethat bilingual upbringing means more than simply respecting some unwritten rules of languageexchange in parent-child communication. This is directed towards two main goals: the goalof greater contribution to pedagogical literature and the goal of solving the “puzzle“ calledchildhood bilingualism and bilingual families.