How do parents think about multilingual upbringing? Comparing OPOL parents and parents who mix languages

Abstract

Parents who raise their children multilingually use various strategies to do so. Folk wisdom has it that the one-parent-one-language (OPOL) approach is the gold standard. However, there is no convincing evidence that OPOL is more beneficial for children’s language outcomes than strategies in which parents mix languages. This study explored potential differences between the beliefs and experiences of parents who used OPOL and parents who mixed languages, using questionnaire data from 134 multilingual families in the Netherlands. Three main questions were addressed: (1) Do OPOL and Mixing parents prepare differently for raising their children multilingually? (2) Do OPOL and Mixing parents express different attitudes towards multilingual upbringing? and (3) Do OPOL and Mixing parents report different experiences with multilingual upbringing? The results showed several differences between the groups. OPOL parents generally started preparing earlier for raising their children multilingually, for example, and were more likely to have made a conscious choice for a multilingual upbringing. Parents who mixed languages were more likely to consider a multilingual upbringing as more difficult than a monolingual upbringing and rate their own experience with multilingual parenting as ‘challenging’. Further research is needed to explain why these differences exist.