Back when my first child Ash-kun was born I remember how helpless I felt being there as my missus zoomz underwent a prolonged and painful labour. zoomz had insisted on giving birth naturally and she was a damn hell of a trooper about it as well. Unfortunately the Gods were not on her side that day. Ash-kun had failed to progress after 12 torturous hours and he had started to show signs of distress. It was therefore decided that he would be delivered by Caesarean section.
I accompanied zoomz to the operating theater where a team of obstetricians prepared to perform the C-section. To obstruct our view of the action that was about to occur they placed a screen over zoomz’s chest. On the ‘business end’ side of the screen the doctor made an incision in her abdominal wall and uterus and pulled Ash-kun from the womb and into the world.
The doctor held Ash-kun up and proudly announced “Congratulations! It’s a boy!” I popped my head above the screen for a look and remember thinking “Oh My God! It’s a frog! No, it’s an alien frog!” To be brutally honest, there was a fleeting moment where I had wondered if he was a science experiment gone wrong. In Ash-kun’s defence the poor kid was overdue and a Caesar which I guess meant that, without a vaginal delivery, he didn’t have the chance to get the juices squeezed from him on the way out giving him a bloated ‘alien frog’ look and a pair of Simpson-esque eyes.
A little while back I wrote a guest post over at Raising Adelaide about the struggle that my wife (“zoomz”) and I have in raising our child (“Ash-kun”) in a bilingual household of English and Japanese.
Ash-kun
Obviously there is no better way to learn a second language than hearing it from birth but what happens if you notice a language developmental issue? Is simultaneous acquisition of both languages the cause? Should you abandon one language in order to consolidate the other? Which language should get priority?
We noticed early on what we thought was a language developmental issue with Ash-kun and made the regrettable decision to abandon the Japanese language. To this day we have struggled to reintroduce the second language sequentially.
Below is an extract from my guest post. If the topic is of interest to you head on over, check it out and join the dialogue.
Although we had set out with best intentions to pass on two languages, we had found it more complicated than we had originally assumed. Ash-kun’s competence in each language was slow to develop. By the time Ash-kun was 2 years of age his English vocabulary was noticeably limited compared to other Aussie kids in his day care. In Japanese he was only able to understand basic instruction and was unable to communicate in the language.
Concerned that he was confused as a result of being overloaded with both languages, zoomz made the fateful decision to stop communicating with him in Japanese and to switch exclusively to English. This decision went against all of the advice that we had been given that suggested that Ash-kun’s hindered language developmental progress was natural as there was a view that children who acquire more than one language simultaneously generally experience language delay.
scott j
C Ohara
Chris
Japan Australia
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