Mothers’ language choices have double the impact in bilingual families, new research shows

New research shows that mothers have twice the impact on language exposure, challenging traditional parenting advice.

Parents hoping to raise bilingual children have long been given the advice to follow a strict one-parent-one-language approach. However, a recent Concordia University study reveals that bilingual Montreal families are charting their own path — with mothers having an extensive impact on children’s language exposure.

The study found that instead of following the one-parent-one-language approach, in Montreal families it is more common for both parents to speak both languages to their children.

“This made sense to us, because there are a lot of adults in Montreal who are actively bilingual,” says Andrea Sander-Montant, a PhD student at the Concordia Infant Research Lab and the study’s lead author.

“It’s also telling us that families are using approaches that they feel comfortable with, despite traditional advice given to parents about raising bilingual children.”

The researchers analyzed questionnaires filled out by hundreds of families that had participated in the lab’s studies between 2013 and 2020. They identified four main strategies: one-parent-one-language, both-parents-bilingual, one-parent-bilingual (where one parent used both languages and the other used one) and one-language-at-home (where one language is used at home and another one is used outside the home, such as at daycare).

“We found that none of these strategies told us much about what the children actually heard at home. There was very little association between the strategies used and how much they were hearing of either language,” explains Krista Byers-Heinlein, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the study’s supervising author.

‘A new way of talking about transmitting languages’

This means that there wasn’t a single strategy that could be singled out as “best” to raise a child bilingually. But when they looked at parents’ language use individually rather than the family’s overall strategy, the researchers had an unexpected and striking finding: mothers had up to twice the impact on language exposure compared to fathers.

“In the average family, if the mother is speaking only French, for example, the child will hear a lot of French. If the father is the only one speaking French, the child will hear a lot less,” says Byers-Heinlein.

The outside influence of mothers was particularly clear in heritage-language families. Among a subgroup of 60 families within the nearly 300 studied who were using a community language (either English or French) and a heritage language at home, mothers were typically the ones transmitting the heritage language, even if both parents were heritage-language speakers.

“We think this may be the case because mothers still spend more time at home than fathers. There may also be cultural factors at play, where mothers feel it is their responsibility to transmit the language,” adds Sander-Montant.

“This points to a new way of talking about transmitting languages,” says Byers-Heinlein, the Concordia University Research Chair on Bilingualism and Open Science. “We estimate that young children need 20 to 30 waking hours weekly hearing each of the languages they are acquiring. Rather than stressing about using this or that strategy, families can make a calculation of who is spending time with the child and then work backwards to figure out how the child can receive enough experience in each language from fluent speakers.”

The researchers believe these findings will have real-world impact for policymakers, health-care workers and professionals who closely work with and give advice to bilingual families. The research points out the need for flexible, family-centred recommendations to support bilingual development.

Rébecca Bissonnette, BA 21, contributed to this research.

This study was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Read the cited paper: “Like mother like child: Differential impact of mothers’ and fathers’ individual language use on bilingual language exposure.”