I just had my first baby who is now 5 months old.

My wife is from the Ukraine and her first language is Russian. Her whole family, who live in Ukraine, speak no English at all.

I have learned a little Russian since getting married, but we speak between each other almost entirely in English.

We are raising the kid to be bilingual, so my wife is speaking to the baby only in Russian, and I am speaking to him in English.

We try to stay disciplined with this, but it can be difficult, especially when we are all together.

From what I have read, it shouldn't be a problem to raise the child knowing both languages completely fluently, and without any accent.

I have been told though that he may begin to speak a little late.

Is anyone else raising bilingual children?

Any advice would be appreciated.

The studies regarding multi-lingual kids is pretty compelling. Yes there is a slight delay in speech, but the benefits seem to compensate.

Many families that I really respect (that are not bilingual at home like you guys), are sending their kids to language immersion school here in austin. We profiled one of the schools in this video.

They make a pretty compelling case for being bi-lingual.

I really regret not doing more language at an early age. One kid had a lot more exposure to Spanish than the other early on, and it shows. Just to say that if any dads are considering it I say go for it. They are only young once.

Here is some dadlabs content that is related to the matter.

www.dadlabs.com/The-Lab/language-immersion-school.html
www.dadlabs.com/blog/1424/

I don't have any data, but I say "go for it." We've taught our son and are teaching our daughter sign language (I guess we could make the argument for whether that qualifies as bilingual or not), and the benefits are definitely tangible. To be able to modify my child's behavior with a discrete non-verbal in a public setting is invaluable to me.

More to your point, though. I have a difficult time imagining any downsides to helping the child be bi- or multi-lingual at an early age.

I have some friends that are raising their two boys to be bilingual. Similar to Matt's experience, the mother speaks entirely in Spanish and the father just English. Their second son isn't of speaking age yet, so one of the things we're curios to see is if the boys will speak Spanish and English to each other or if they will simply go to English as the default community language. Our upstairs neighbors are Bulgarian and Croatian, and speak Russian to each other but know English very well. So they are teaching their son to speak both Russian and English. From what I can tell, Boris has had a delay in speech, but I imagine it might be difficult learning language when hearing 4 different ones at any given time. I suspect that as long as there are language anchors, like each parent speaking only one language when communicating with the child, that it is easier than if there is little for the child to grasp onto as with indiscriminate language use. I imagine the child simply comes to acknowledge that there is one way to communicate with mommy and one with daddy. I would love to do this, but neither my wife or I are fluent in any other language. But we are going to attempt to use some sign language.

Sign language has been VERY valuable to us. TheBoy has moved on from it, almost completely, but simple words like help, more, please, milk, ready, along with some animal signs, have all been great while he was younger and not really ready to speak. It is amazing to be able to communicate with him. We hope to use sign language more as he gets older, for exactly the reason stated above, discreet QUIET communication where appropriate (like maybe church!)...

As for other languages, we certainly should do more, but I also don't want to confuse him. HisMother has been teaching him to count in German, and has a German lullaby she sings. It freaks me out when he starts counting in German on his own! So he's certainly getting it. He also has a few toys that he can switch from Spanish to English, but he doesn't seem to understand, but I think that's because we haven't been reinforcing those words ourselves.

All in all, it's a GREAT idea, and a second (or third, or more) language is going to be a very valuable skill to have.