How My Family Language Journey As A Mom Started

If you are interested in how my family language journey and my journey of becoming a mom of 4 children fit together, you will find some insights here and in the previous blog post...

My journey as a Mom began in 2010 when my first child Lasse was born. I always had the dream to have two children in my life cause I have two hands and was sure to handle this. So, we were overwhelmed when our dream came true, and we welcomed our beautiful and lovely daughter Charlotte, less than two years later.

Six years later, in 2017, we enlarged our family with our son Kalle and in 2019 with our last little by Anton. Having 4 wonderful children is more than I ever dreamed of. We really feel complete and are extremely thankful!

Reason #1 To Start Your Family Language Journey: Feeling Confident And Proud Of Speaking A Foreign Language

Being pregnant and becoming a mother is the point in your life when you think about your own life and what worked for you and what didn't really work out so well. You will start thinking about what you would wish your kids will experience once. Of course, I want them primarily to be happy and healthy in life and of course, they have to take a lot of obstacles on their own, which won’t be easy to accompany as parents without trying to solve all these problems before they even realize that there is one ;-) 

Reason #2 To Start Your Family Language Journey: Foreign Languages Help To Connect With Wonderful People Around The World

Realizing, that English has been not only a basic skill for my job but also the key to connecting to wonderful people from other countries – wouldn’t it be great if my kids could do it better?

After Lasse was born I asked myself the first time if I could raise my children bilingual with my knowledge of English? Is this possible even though Volker and I are German native speaker and live in Germany?

Get Yourself Ready And Start Your Family Language Journey: To Raise Your Kids Bilingual Even As Monolingual Parents Is Possible

In our first Kindergarten, we could see that one German couple already practiced the idea to raise their children bilingual by talking to them only in English. And it seemed to work out quite well: the Kids answered in German but you could see that they understood the English dialogs perfectly.

I talked to my friend Joanna from Great Britain and she said, Sabine, I already had the same idea for my children, to raise them bilingual in German and maybe in French. On the one hand, we were relieved that we are not alone with this idea but how should we start?

How To Start Your Family Language Journey?

Personally, I didn’t found myself comfortable speaking English in my family cause I probably would feel like an alien in my own house. Would I find the right words? I was afraid of thinking too much about what I wanted to say in that foreign language and that the easiness of my talking to my kids would vanish. Because I knew my English is not perfect I started to look for something that would help me to achieve the missing language skills.

But unfortunately, I couldn’t find one that would fit my demands.

Reason #3 To Start Your Family Language Journey: The Impact Of Foreign Languages In Our Kids Life

Today, my older children, Lasse and Charlotte, already got a glimpse of how important it is, having the ability to speak English. Apart from having English and French from their first day in school, they also have contact with other children who are raised bilingual cause their parents speak two different native tongues or cause their chosen family language is English as a foreign language to both parents.

Apart from that: listening to English songs on the radio, the kids often asked me what are they singing about? And of course, they had seen all the grown-ups from our family speaking with our friends from Australia in English, when they stayed here for a few weeks a year ago.

But, caught in everyday life as a working mom, I lost my wish to raise my children bilingually, for some time...

Just Start Your Family Language Journey Today! 

Until we had the Covid lockdown in March 2020, we suddenly had so much time as a family together - why not use this intense time and start speaking in English with our kids?

And so I started to develop my own family language journey for becoming a bilingual family.

How we started and how the children and I mastered this challenge will be the topic for my next blog post. So, if you don't want to miss a single post, sign up here for my newsletter.