Insights

This talk focuses on parents and children in multilingual families working together to understand each other better. During the pandemic, families everywhere spent more time together, which had been stressful, but also gave more opportunities for talking as a family. 

Dr Sabine Little and her son Toby discuss the ‘un/familiar space’ they developed as part of their research project and how they used it to discuss how Toby is growing up multilingual. They show how the methodology itself is useful both for family research and for family communication itself. Dr Little co-authored this research with her son who was 10 when the paper was submitted and is now 16 years old.

Blog: The emotional load of multilingual parenting  - Dr Sabine Little

May 20, 2019

"However, as we consider the emotional load of multilingual parenting, it is important that we don’t forget the emotional load for children, too, and maybe, if we keep talking to each other, they might just be our strongest allies in maintaining the heritage language."

——Dr. Sabine Little