The Parenting Thread

[GoktimusPrime]

"nothing wrong with digital flatulence honey".

You just described TF Prime Bumblebee's voice.

[BruiseLee]

You just described TF Prime Bumblebee's voice.

Cannot be unheard now. There goes the Netflix binge session!

[GoktimusPrime]

Raising a Trilingual Child: Does Passive Language Learning Work?

[GoktimusPrime]

Tip for Sydneysiders during the school holidays, the Powerhouse Museum is currently having a DC Lego exhibit. To coincide with this, you can have pictures taken where it looks like you're flying.

[Raider]

Tip for Sydneysiders during the school holidays, the Powerhouse Museum is currently having a DC Lego exhibit. To coincide with this, you can have pictures taken where it looks like you're flying.

Highly recommend this. My 2 year old loved it, apart from the fact that he wanted to touch everything haha.

[GoktimusPrime]

Heh. It's good that they have the Lego free play area at the end, although when we were there it was too crowded. I also stepped on a Lego brick. Just as well I wasn't barefoot!

Remember when we were at school, and people would tell others to go fornicate themselves? These days my students tell each other to, "Go step on a Lego brick"! Oowwwwwwch! XO

[GoktimusPrime]

Reflecting on the very first post on this thread; at the time I wasn't a parent yet. My wife was 6 months pregnant, and in that post I talked about the idea of raising our child multilingually using the une personne une langue method where each parent exclusively speaks a different language to the child. As you know, this is how we've been raising our daughter for the past 6.5 years.

So what has been the result of this? This video shows our daughter switching across her three languages.

It's a daily effort to ensure that she is using the target languages. As Dr. Russell Cross says, one thing that Australia is very good at is killing off languages other than English. Because my wife and I have to speak to each other in English, our daughter is fully aware that we can both speak it. As with anything else with child-rearing, consistency is king.

I think that one mistake that some parents make is assuming that children can simply acquire a language via nothing more than osmosis. Thinking that just because they keep speaking to the child in the target language, and even if the child responds in the target language, that this is all you need. A limited exposure to things like books, films and importantly, higher order conversations in the target language. Some parents simply teach their children to learn simply a 'household level of fluency.' They can speak with their family, but can they do more?

Some things that I do to ensure that she has more than just 'household fluency' include:
* Helping her do her homework. This evening she was looking at number sequences, so all the help and discussion about it was exclusively done in the target language.
* Playing games. Board games like Transformers Monopoly or Chess, as well as war games like Star Wars Miniatures.
* Playing with toys. So all the voices, play stories etc. are done in the target language.
* Talking about films and TV shows that we watch. e.g. Star Wars, and as recently mentioned on the Anime thread, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross.
etc.
* Encouraging the child to read/write in the target language. Admittedly this is a greater challenge than teaching a child to speak. Yuki can read Japanese but her sustained writing isn't nearly as good as her English. I recently started teaching her the first 80 set of Kanji (just doing it in small chunks, I've given myself until June to finish teaching her this set before moving onto the next one).
* A good Community Language School helps a lot. Yuki just resumed her Japanese school last Saturday, and after school there was a noticeable improvement in her confidence and fluency in speaking Japanese. I think that it just helps to have a child use the target language in a school environment; interacting with adults and children who aren't their family. Also for me, because Japanese isn't my native language, Japanese school is the one place where she can practice speaking with native speaking teachers.

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In Post 7 I talked about my ideas for behaviour management based on Choice Reality (which forms the core of the PBEL policies that many schools use now). In hindsight I can see that this actually worked really, really well. The first 2 years were the toughest, but we remained steadfastly consistent and continue to use positive behaviour methods and for the most part, Yuki has proven to be a pretty easy child to parent in terms of behaviour management. All of her teachers (primary school, Chinese school & Japanese school) continually praise her behaviour and hard work ethic in her classes, and this is also reflected in her report comments. I've also had a lot of other people, including parents, tell me how well behaved she is.

When I first created this thread back in March 2009, I wasn't a parent yet. We had theoretical ideas on how we wanted to parent our child - theory based on copious research, but still theories for us at the time. I knew that CR/PBEL worked well with my students, but would it also work for my own child? After all, a parent-child dynamic isn't the same as teacher-student. There are quite a few things about parenting that's harder than teaching, such as:
* It's full time, even on weekends and holidays! If a student is being difficult, you only need to endure it for that period or during school hours. Eventually they get to bugger off home and drive their own family mental. But when it's your own child, you are that family to be driven mental!
* No escalation! Schools work through a hierarchical system of escalations; if you won't listen to your teacher you get sent to the Head Teacher. If you won't listen to the HT, then you get sent to the Deputy Principal, and if you won't listen to the DP then you get suspended and you're out of everyone's hair. Not so with parenting! As a parent, the buck stops with you! If your child won't listen to you, then you have to do something to make them listen. There's no higher authority for you to flick the kid off to while you fill in an incident report, because you are the highest authority for your child.

Anyway, the point of this post was basically to compare the results of our parenting (so far) with the hypotheses that we had before Yuki was born. Conclusion: Consistency is victory!

[BigTransformerTrev]

The last two days have been beautiful. The kids both slept in Sunday morning, were happy all morning then didn't whinge at all when we dropped them off at my brothers so I could take the wife out for a Valentines Day lunch. It was a good chance for Sarah and I to reconnect and have some us time for a few hours

That afternoon I got a good 45 minutes just me-and-her time with my daughter playing on our bed. She was happy and playful and affectionate and we had some wonderful quality time before my wife and son found out where we were holed up

That night took my son to bed and we had a good hour of reading stories and chatting before I put him down. So had some really great one-on-one time with the three people that matter most to me.

This morning I was the last one out of bed (a rarity) and when I came down to the loungeroom both kids broke into giant smiles. First Orion came and had a big cuddle, then Acacia did. Then both sat on my lap snuggled up to me and each other. Then I looked down and they were holding hands! I nearly teared up, it was so beautiful!

Really regretting having to come to work today (as I do most days anyway), really missing my little family at home and by the sad looks on the kids faces when I had to leave I think the feeling was mutual.

[Trent]

Parent fantasy hotline

I may need to give them a call

[GoktimusPrime]

^Brilliant!