Infographic: Multilingualism, the importance of the first years and the role of the parents

Back in May, while I was preparing my interview for the Congreso Online Montessori 2018, I reflected on how multilingualism can also be a tool to educate our children towards peace. And I realized something: I always wanted to give my children Italian and Finnish to be able to communicate with our respective Italian and Finnish families and people, but that’s not the reason why I wanted my kids to be multilingual.The real reason (besides all the scientifically-proven benefits that multilingua...

After my interview at the Congreso Online Montessori 2018, I received so many emails from parents from all over the world asking for advice, telling me their experiences, their language situations at home, and especially, their concerns.I also worry about languages when it comes to my kids.I speak three languages fluently, but I’m not multilingual. Multilingualism is not only speaking more than one language, it’s a superpower that wires your brain differently when you learn more than one lang...

So many of you have been asking how Oliver’s doing with the four languages, so today I thought I would answer just that, and I’ll do it through his own words.His speech is full-on at the moment, but because he’s growing up with four native languages he’s now truly and deeply mixing all of them—which makes his language something that really only mummy and daddy understand fully (and not always ;-).Many of you also asked if Oliver’s confused by having so many languages, and the truth is he’s no...

If you want to know about raising multilingual kids, please take a look at this infographic that I created for you :-)As you probably know, we’re raising Oliver and Emily multilingual. Except rare exceptions, I speak to them exclusively in Italian, Alex exclusively in Finnish, and Oliver goes to a bilingual school where one teacher speaks to them in English and the other one in Spanish.I strongly insisted on this language setup, because thanks to my personal experience teaching languages in t...

I’m not sure I mentioned before that we’re raising Oliver trilingual (the country we live in will take care of the fourth language, Spanish). I’m Italian, Alex is Finnish, we speak English together, so these are the three languages we’re teaching Oliver at home.And no, we’re not overachievers, we just happen to have a mix of cultures in our household and thought it’d be a shame to let it go to waste.But in these 15 months since Oliver was born, I realised that trilingualism does not come easi...