Attempting to raise your child bilingually is a labor of love. It is more demanding than getting them to play soccer or learn to play the piano because it requires a hefty intellectual, physical, emotional, and financial commitment from the parents. You must be all in from birth through high school to make it work.
Intellectually, you must develop long-term and short-term strategies to get your child to speak both languages. Physically, it can require you to bring your child not just to language schools, 
which are often far away, but also to playdates with other children who speak the language. Emotionally, it is a commitment to communicate to your child in ways where they may not fully grasp or feel the scope and depth of your feelings. Financially, paying for language school, books, media, supplies, and cable TV channels in the language is a commitment.
We intentionally set out to raise our daughters bilingually from the start. I had already developed an interest in language acquisition before having kids. This interest motivated me to read books on raising children bilingually before my daughters were born. Fast forward to today, and I am proud to see that our efforts paid off because my adult daughters are bilingual.
I wrote this blog post to share some of the strategies and tactics that helped us be successful in getting the outcomes we sought. Before we get into them, there are five key things you need to understand first:
The first is that kids don’t care about becoming bilingual. They want to use whatever language gets them what they need at any given moment. You can’t expect your kids to want to become bilingual. That is an adult way of thinking about it.
The second is that you’ll succeed more if you can find ways to make your child feel proud and unique to be bicultural and bilingual. For example, we would regularly talk to our daughters about how special it was that they had two passports and could speak two languages. We framed it for them as a gift that they need to appreciate. This made being bilingual feel special for them.
The third is that bilingualism exists on a spectrum. It is common for bilingual people to be stronger communicators in one language over the other. It is also common for bilinguals to have a greater range of topics they can talk about in the language they were educated in. The point I am making here is that it is less common for someone to be equally proficient in both languages.
We raised our children bilingually in English and Japanese. Their mother tongue was Japanese because they were both born in Japan, which was the primary language they always heard. However, once we moved to America, slowly, over time, English became the dominant language. We worked hard to ensure they kept their Japanese.
The fourth is that languages with different writing systems will require much more effort than ones with the same alphabet and proto-languages as English.
The final one is obvious but still worth explicitly stating before we jump into the tips. The greatest effort needs to be made for the weaker language, which, for the purposes of this blog, will likely not be English.
Let’s jump into the tips:
Tip #1: Establish speaking norms to give your child a reason to use both languages. Parent A speaks in Language X, and Parent B speaks in Language Y. If your child wants something from Parent A, then they have to speak Parent A’s language and vice versa.
Tip #2: Start these efforts from before birth by speaking, reading, and singing to your baby in the womb in both languages.
Tip #3: Even if your child is only responding to the parent of the weaker language in the stronger language, don’t stop speaking in the weaker language.
Tip #4: At some point, to break the habit of your child speaking to the parent of the weaker language in the stronger language, the parent of the weaker language may have to pretend not to understand the child until they start using the weaker language.
Tip #5: 
Read books in both languages to your child as often as possible - ideally each night. Bonus points if you can read the same book in two languages.
Tip #6: Create opportunities for your child to interact with other speakers of the weaker language, such as video calls with grandparents or playdates with other mixed-language families.
Tip #7: Create opportunities to have a variety of media in the weaker language playing all the time, from music to cartoons, TV Shows, movies, and podcasts in the car.
Tip # 8: Take your child to local places where the weaker language is spoken, like cafes, bookstores, and community centers.
Tip #9: If you can afford to travel, use time in summer vacation to take your child back to the country where the weaker language is spoken.
Tip #10: Enroll your child in a language school. We enrolled our daughters in a weekend school for Japanese that went through the standard curriculum taught in Japanese public schools. They took five days of learning and squished it into one day on the weekend with a lot of homework expected to be done with parental support over the week.
Tip #11: Make a point to celebrate the holidays from the culture of the weaker language. As New year’s Day is the most important holiday of the year in Japan, we always celebrated it with the food and rituals.
Tip #12: If the weaker language has a different writing system then make name tags in both languages for the bedroom doors. They’re a constant reminder of being bilingual and bicultural.
Tip #13: Incorporate some of the ritualistic behaviors or customs from the culture of the weaker language into daily life. For example, it is customary to leave your shoes at the front door in Japan so we made sure to do that in the US. We also made sure that guests did that as well. 
Tip #14: Use the weaker language to say some of the common things we say at certain moments each day like I’m home or I’ll be back in.
