Bilingual children are often mistakenly diagnosed with early learning disabilities because the standardised tests for academic competence that we currently have were created based on data derived from monolingual children. In this TedTalk by Emilia Saenz Rios, she argues that the benefits of bilingualism are undeniable and that we need to persevere and be more patient. While the pace of language development may seem slower in bilingual children at first when compared to their monolingual counterparts, over time bilingual children will inevitably catch up as they learn the differences governing each language.
We as parents will naturally react to ensure that our children succeed academically. I can assure you we had our fair share of conversations on whether we should stop with our efforts to bring up our first born bilingually when we benchmarked the pace of her speech progress with other children who were mostly brought up monolingually.
If you are bringing up your children in more than one language, you need to be more patient and attentive to ensure that knowing two or even three languages is seen as a strength and not as a handicap. The struggle at the beginning is always difficult but trust me the efforts will pay off eventually.
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