Raising Multilingual Children (or Not) - NYTimes.com: Marcus Mabry, editor at large at The International Herald Tribune, is raising his twins to be trilingual, an act of parental aggression that I’m having a hard time not taking personally. It’s not even that either he, or his partner, speaks another language as a native. It’s just that he’s trying to do what’s best for them, and so he speaks to them only in French, while their nanny speaks to them in Mandarin, and his partner speaks English.
Those twins are going to be well prepared for their international life, and, if Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, writing in the Sunday Review, is right, smarter than the average single-language speaking child (mine). Actually, despite my sarcasm, I’m appreciative of his efforts — any American who has traveled overseas knows that if more of us spoke a second language, we’d have, if nothing else, a better international reputation.
