Sprechen you English, Little Baby?

So yesterday Glenn and I began a discussion about how we are going to raise Jamie to be bilingual. It has always seemed a shame to me that both us would be fluent in German and not raise him able to speak both languages. My father is Dutch, and although I was obvlivious to what this meant, as a child, when I was a teenager and in college, I really wished my dad had taught me the language growing up. I ended up learning it, myself, when I studied abroad in 2001, but I am still not fluent in it.

In any case, there are several approaches to how Glenn and I would do this, but each of them comes with it's own difficulties. The most traditional way to do this is to have one parent speak in English and the other in the other language. But neither of us feels like we would be able to hold strong enough to speaking in German the entire time.

Another scenerio has the parents speaking the target language at home and English amongst the rest of the world. For me, the issue there is that for the first year, the majority of the time with us will be spent at home, leading us to mainly be communicating with him in German.

Glenn heard a radio program (on NPR, of course) about raising bilingual children. Apparently, as they grow older, most parents worry about confusing the children about when to speak which language. However, as he says, the children are actually extremely (to a surprising degree) adept at understanding the patterns of when to do each. If you do it from the beginning, they apparently figure it out.

The other big difficult for us would be that no one else in either of our families speaks German, although my Dad likes to pretend he does. Thus, how would Glenn and I communicate with family when they were around.

In thinking, I came up with a solution that, at the moment, seems like the most likely scenerio. It all comes from the fact that in those first months, Jamie is going to be mainly home with me during the day while Glenn is at work. I can't imagine being home all day alone with him and speaking German to myself and to him. Although it would be simple for me, it doesn't always feel 100% natural. Thus, we are thinking that, in that time that he is home with me, I will probably speak English with him, so he is exposed to that, as much as to German. And if I go out, and Glenn is home with him, Glenn will speak English with him. But for the times when we are home as a family with all three of us there, we will speak in German. As well, this means that if we have company over, we will speak in English, so he realizes that with other people, he should speak English. But the main thing is that when we are having family time, we will be speaking in German.

It isn't totally decided that that is what we will do, but as of now, that is where we stand.