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My wife's mother told me an interesting story about when she was growing up. It made me think a lot about parenting and communication. Here it is:
When she was very young her father took her and her twin sister as babies to America. He (the father) spoke both English and Polish. Her mother who had stayed back in Poland for a year eventually joined them in America. The father felt that because the babies were Americans they should speak English. So they only learned English. Their mother was a housewife and only socialized with her family and friends from Poland in their Pittsburgh community and never learned English. Because the kids only spoke English and the mother only spoke Polish, they could not speak to each other verbally. The father acted as translator.
I wonder how common this is with today's immigrants?
My wife's mother told me an interesting story about when she was growing up. It made me think a lot about parenting and communication. Here it is:
When she was very young her father took her and her twin sister as babies to America. He (the father) spoke both English and Polish. Her mother who had stayed back in Poland for a year eventually joined them in America. The father felt that because the babies were Americans they should speak English. So they only learned English. Their mother was a housewife and only socialized with her family and friends from Poland in their Pittsburgh community and never learned English. Because the kids only spoke English and the mother only spoke Polish, they could not speak to each other verbally. The father acted as translator.
I wonder how common this is with today's immigrants?
Your story has a lot of holes.
If the children were babies and their mother was only gone for a year they would have been toddlers or young preschoolers when she returned to their lives. It is incredible that 2 or 3 year olds never learned enough Polish to communicate directly with their mother. Was the mother living in the same house? If yes, the children must have heard her speaking with their father every single day plus heard her talking with the neighbors and friends in Polish. That probably would equal hearing Polish for an hour or more likely several hours a day.
Of course, they would have learned enough Polish to talk with her.
My grandmother, who moved from Germany to the US as an adult, only spoke German and I only spoke English. I saw her perhaps an hour or a couple of hours every three or four or five months (at the very most) and I, and all of my siblings, could fairly easily communicate with her, without anyone translating, from the time that we were children through when she died when I was a teenager. Occasionally there may be a word or two that would stump one of us but then we would just try to repeat the thought using different words.
If I had actually lived with her I am sure that I, as most children, would have easily and naturally learned her language.
Unless your MIL & her sister were actively punished for speaking Polish I suspect that they really could talk with their mother but just did not want to do that or perhaps your MIL is not remembering or telling you the story correctly. Or maybe she was referring to a specific situation where she was trying to describe something very difficult/complex to her mother, perhaps algebra, chemistry or another HS subject and needed the dad to translate the technical terms into Polish.
BTW, most children of immigrants today, as in the past, are very actively bi-lingual.
Last edited by germaine2626; 04-01-2014 at 03:15 PM..
My step-grandmother primarily speaks a language the rest of us do not. We picked up enough to understand her, and she picked up enough English that we were able to communicate effectively if a bit unorthodoxly.
Most kids can understand their parents native languages even if they cannot speak it.
My wife's mother told me an interesting story about when she was growing up. It made me think a lot about parenting and communication. Here it is:
When she was very young her father took her and her twin sister as babies to America. He (the father) spoke both English and Polish. Her mother who had stayed back in Poland for a year eventually joined them in America. The father felt that because the babies were Americans they should speak English. So they only learned English. Their mother was a housewife and only socialized with her family and friends from Poland in their Pittsburgh community and never learned English. Because the kids only spoke English and the mother only spoke Polish, they could not speak to each other verbally. The father acted as translator.
I wonder how common this is with today's immigrants?
It's not.
It also wasn't common among Poles when your MIL was very young. Never mind the fact that the human brain is wired to learn multiple languages (and switch between them) up to about age 13. Full immersion would have made learning Polish fairly easy for them. A linguist would have checked their hearing if they were unable to learn enough Polish to communicate with their mother.
A Polish father, who probably worked 12-hour days as a laborer or a coal miner, in Pittsburgh who translated for his children? Yeah, right.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 04-01-2014 at 05:44 PM..
Yes, I know a few families in this situation but there is usually some crossover and the parent learns some words in English and the children learn some words of their family's native tongue. It's not like they don't pick up anything from each other. Usually, I've seen it when an older relative lives in the family (ie. grandparent or that generation) and the adult child speaks both English and the native tongue and the grandchildren primarily speak English and almost none of their grandparents'/older relative's native tongue.
I am hearing this story second hand and on the surface it does seem to have holes in it but I see no reason why my wife's mother would lie to us about this. She knew a few words in her mothers language and her mother knew a few words in English but not enough to really communicate.
BTW, most children of immigrants today, as in the past, are very actively bi-lingual.
Although I am also skeptical of OP's story, I don't understand why people generalize about what "most people" are. How do you know what or who "most people" are? You don't, because you don't know most people. I am the child of an immigrant. My father is from India. I don't know either one of his languages, Hindi and Bengali. He didn't try to teach me, and my mother is not Indian. My ex-husband is Hispanic. His parents were both from Mexico. He doesn't know Spanish. My SIL is also a child of immigrants and she doesn't know any Spanish either. My grandmother is also the child of immigrants. Her family emigrated from Ireland because of the Irish potato famine. She knows not a word of Gaelic. Shall I go on? It's likely that the attitudes of many immigrants today have changed and they believe teaching or speaking the language of the home country to be unimportant.
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All praise the day when the OP gets a full time job to ease his boredom and stops creating these daft scenarios.