This morning, I was reading a bilingual version of Mulan to my six-year-old daughter. I wanted to read it in Mandarin, not because she prefers it, but because it’s the language she doesn’t hear as often. In a country where English surrounds her, I’ve learned I have to protect time for Chinese. After the first page, she asked, gently but firmly, if I could read it in English instead. I hesitated. I felt the tug between honoring her comfort and holding on to a language I don’t want her to lose. Ultimately, I said yes. But I also decided to translate just one word per page into Chinese. She seemed to accept it as I read the story. Halfway through the book, she paused and pointed to 軍隊 (army), a word I had already said in Mandarin and translated once into English. “What does 軍隊 mean again?” she asked. A small moment, but it reminded me of something bigger: when we let children lead, they often return to the language in their own time.
As parents and educators, we carry deep hopes when it comes to language. We want our children to inherit what shaped us, to speak with our elders, to hold on to culture, to belong in more than one world. But bilingualism isn’t a one-way transmission. It’s a relationship. And like any relationship, it thrives on agency, trust, and consent. When children are positioned only as passive recipients of language, we risk making it a source of pressure rather than pride. What would it mean to treat them not just as learners, but as decision-makers in their own multilingual journey?
That might mean letting them choose the books they read in the target language, even if they’re silly or light. It might mean saying yes to music, movies, or games that build connection instead of drilling vocabulary. It might mean holding back the impulse to correct mid-sentence, and letting code-switching be a valid expression of thought, not a mistake to fix. These are not just pedagogical strategies. They are acts of respect. Small, everyday ways we show children that language isn’t just something they inherit, but something they shape.
This doesn’t mean stepping back entirely. Language development still requires modeling, consistency, and scaffolding. But it also requires recognizing that children are not replicas of us. They are becoming their own multilingual selves. Scholars of bilingual education have long emphasized that learner autonomy is one of the most powerful drivers of language retention. When children feel ownership over their language story, when they see it as something they want to carry, not something they have to, they are more likely to hold onto it in meaningful, lasting, and personal ways.