Let me start by presenting myself! My name is Natalia and I have been working at Barnakademin with bilingual babysitetrs for some time. In my job as a manager, I regularly meet families who are raising their kids bilingual. I am a bilingual mother myself and my 2 daughters who are 7 and 16 are also raised bilingual.
I was always aware that being bilingual gives a lot of benefits in life. But only after I started to help other international families I realized that benefits are even greater than I ever considered!
I did some research on my own and was surprised to find out that being bilingual gives us even emotional advantages and health advantages! And now I feel ready to share with you my thoughts and my private experience!
Emotional benefits
Probably the most obvious benefit is that your kids will be able to speak the same language as their relatives (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins). It is common nowadays that members of the family live in different countries. Just think how strongly connected your kid will feel at family gatherings! Speaking the same language provides a very tight emotional bond for your kid with the family members.Cultural benefits
Bilingual children are generally more open-minded. Well, I already knew that. But what I was happy to find out is that bilingual children tend to be more tolerant of other cultures as well! They have much less prejudice to other religions, customs, and traditions. So in my conclusion, bilingual kids can easily adapt to new environments because of the multinational cultural background they have.Practical benefits
- Traveling
- Greater job opportunities
Educational benefits
When I did my research I came across a lot of research showing that bilingual kids do better in school and generally get higher scores on tests compared to the kids who speak only one language. It is easy to see why. From early childhood, the brain of a bilingual child is trained much more compared to a monolingual kid. As a result, bilingual kids are better at problem-solving and their cognitive skills are more developed.
Health
Not that we need to worry about the health problems, like strokes and dementia now, but still, it is always great to know that bilingual people recover quicker from strokes and according to statistics develop dementia 4-5 years later than monolingual people. This is according to the new studies I found online.To tell you the truth all this makes me feel really good! I feel certain that all the hard work I put into teaching my kids two languages will pay out well.
Being parents, we always try to give our kids something that can make their life easier. And it looks like bilingualism is an excellent superpower they can use for the rest of their life.
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