Navigating language maintenance challenges with health professionals: Reflections from Spanish speaking families in Australia

ABSTRACT

Parents often worry children will lose their heritage language when their spoken language develops and they transition to majority language environments. With a growing population of Spanish speakers in Australia, increased attendance at childcare and earlier and more frequent exposure to English, there is a need to understand what advice health professionals are imparting to support language maintenance amongst the Spanish speaking community. In this study, I interviewed 13 Chilean and Colombian mothers about the language maintenance challenges they encountered when their children transitioned to majority language environments. I also investigated if they had sought advice from health professionals, what advice they had been provided, and what impact that had on their family language policy. This study showed that parents often adopted different family language policies in spite of, rather than because of, advice from health professionals. The need for more nuanced and informed advice to support language maintenance in the early years warrants further research into professional development and training in multilingual development.

KEYWORDS:

• Language maintenance
• language shift
• family language policy
• multilingual development
• health professionals
• Spanish

1. Introduction

Multilingualism is a normal and unremarkable part of life in the majority of the world (Romaine, 2017, p. 541). Given the increasingly globalized nature of work, study and travel that contributes to an ever-growing level of immigration in Australia, raising multilingual children in culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) families is set to become the norm rather than the exception. We are now a “majority migrant nation” (Department of Home Affairs [Australia], 2023), with one in four Australians and nearly one third of all Victorians speaking a language other than English at home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). With three in five children attending childcare in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022), now more than ever health professionals need to promote the development, use and maintenance of heritage languages (HL) (Piller & Gerber, 2018, p. 12; Verdon et al., 2014, p. 179), especially as children transition to majority language environments where their HL can fall into disuse.

Health professionals play an important role in supporting children’s language development in Australia, particularly through child health services that operate Australia-wide. These services provide regular, scheduled and free consultations for all parents of children between the ages of 0 and 4 years, providing information, support and guidance on a variety of topics, including language development. Due to this ongoing relationship, child health nurses have the capacity to inform and shape multilingual parenting choices with their education and training in the areas of early childhood development and language acquisition.

It has long been acknowledged that CALD children’s exposure to the majority language in early education settings typically results in language shift (De Klerk, 2000; Nesteruk, 2010; Wong Fillmore, 1991). This is not only due to the increased input and use of the majority language, but also because of the changes that parents commonly make to their family language policy (FLP). Described as “explicit and overt planning in relation to language use within the home and among family members” (King et al., 2008, p. 907), FLP is developed by families to encourage HL maintenance and allay language shift (Guardado & Becker, 2014). Some of the many reasons why parents may wish to maintain the HL is so that their children can develop relationships with family who only speak the HL (Verdon et al., 2014, p. 169), to be part of an extended social network of HL speakers (Bradley, 2013, p. 5), or to tap into the many cognitive benefits of multilingualism (Bialystok, 2011). In spite of these underlying reasons, parents often reluctantly change their initial FLP to include far less HL than originally intended in an attempt to accommodate their children’s growing preference for the majority language (see again De Klerk, 2000; Nesteruk, 2010; Wong Fillmore, 1991). As children become more immersed in early education settings, the exclusive use of the HL as part of the one person, one language (OPOL) or minority language at home (MLAH) approach tends to give way to mixing languages or complete language shift. Some parents may address mixing with one or more of the discourse strategies shown in Table 1 in order to reinforce the HL.

Table 1 Parental discourse strategies towards child mixing (adapted from Lanza, 1997)

Discourse strategy	Description
Minimal grasp	Adult indicates no comprehension of the child’s language choice
Repetition	Adult repetition of the child’s utterance, using the HL
Expressed guess	Adult asks a yes/no question using the HL
Move on	Adult continues the conversation in HL
Code switch	Adult code switches

The final option, whereby the adult shifts to the majority language, can often become the default communication style for parents as their children become more accustomed to hearing the majority language outside the home and develop a preference for it. This increasing uptake of majority language within the family may occur for several other reasons: parents may worry that continued HL use will negatively impact their children’s majority language development; they may also worry about their children’s ability to integrate into social settings with other children who do not share their HL, or they may change their FLP because it is simply easier to communicate with their children in the majority language rather than face resistance to or rejection of the HL from their children. Sometimes, these changes come about because of parents’ own decisions. Other times, this is the recommended professional advice.

This article aims to investigate what language maintenance challenges Spanish speaking families in Australia face as they navigate their children’s HL development as they transition into majority speaking environments, and what advice health professionals offer parents to manage their concerns. The findings from this study offer valuable insights both for our understanding of FLP and best practice of multilingual advocacy amongst health professionals. This is true not only for Spanish speaking families in Australia, but for professionals who work with other CALD communities who are also in the process of re-evaluating their FLP as their children’s majority language develops.

Research to date has proven that informed multilingual advocacy at an institutional level is key to disseminating information and advice for effective multilingual parenting (Piller & Gerber, 2018, p. 12). Addressing the challenges of language maintenance and shift (LMS) that CALD families face when their children enter childcare, and how health professionals can respond to these challenges, is especially relevant for multicultural countries such as Australia. As sources of guidance and support for parents, health professionals build relationships based on trust and care for the families who they see regularly throughout children’s early years. By providing timely and accurate information, they can support parents to raise their children in the HL and reduce language shift. This is particularly relevant in Australia as primary caregivers with young children return to the workforce in greater numbers, as evidenced by the ever-growing rise in childcare attendance (Department of Education [Australia], 2023). This means that more children are now attending childcare and coming into contact with the majority language at younger ages and earlier stages in their language development. This is all the more reason why the role of health professionals is so important at very young ages and stages of children’s language development to provide parents with informed advice to support language maintenance and prevent language shift.

At a policy level, there is support for HL maintenance in Australia. The national Early Years Learning Framework, delivered by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, outlines key learning outcomes for children, and principles and practices for early childhood professionals. Pertinent to LMS within this framework are children’s identity, wellbeing and communication, respect for diversity, and cultural competence. Educators are encouraged to “actively support” HL maintenance (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2020, p. 26). The framework is oriented towards Ruiz’s typology of language as a right (1984, 2010) with their assertion that children “have the right to be continuing users of their home language as well as to develop competency in Standard Australian English” (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2020, p. 41).

As a leader in language education in Australia (Scarino, 2014, p. 292), Victoria made multilingualism a focus as part of the Victorian Government’s Vision for Languages Education (Department of Education and Early Childhood Development [Victoria], 2011) and the Victorian Early Years Learning and Development Framework (VEYLDF) (Department of Education and Training [Victoria], 2016). In line with policies and attitudes that were forming in the early 2010s, the VEYLDF invokes Ruiz’s (Ruiz, 1984, 2010) typology of language as a resource, stating that “effective practice is strengthened when early childhood professionals … recognize multilingualism as an asset and support children to maintain their first language, learn English as an additional language, and learn languages other than English” (Department of Education and Training, 2016, p. 12).

Training for early childhood practitioners is essential not just in early educational contexts but also in health services, where Maternal and Child Health (MCH) nurses and other health professionals such as GPs, midwives and speech pathologists have the opportunity to provide support and guidance around children’s language development (Department of Education and Training, 2016, p. 6). MCH nurses issue all parents a My Health, Learning and Development Book on their first home visit after the birth of their child as a tool for parents to evaluate and communicate their child’s development to their MCH nurse. However, this record bears no reference to children’s multilingual development (Department of Health [Victoria], 2022). Promotional material in MCH sites from the Department of Education and Training Victoria in the form of posters and flyers urge parents to “speak to your child in the language you know best” (Department of Education and Training [Victoria], 2022), but no further information or resources are available to support parents. If we look to the VEYLDF to see how early childhood professionals might address this gap, it becomes clear that beyond an admirable but generalized message to respect cultural diversity, there are no measurable ways to support language acquisition or maintenance:

The acquisition and maintenance of first or home languages has a significant and continuing role in the construction of identity. This is supported when early childhood professionals respect children’s cultures and languages. In Victoria the rich array of languages and cultures enable many opportunities for valuing and strengthening multilingual capabilities, respecting cultural diversity, supporting common values and building social cohesion. (Department of Education and Training [Victoria], 2016, p. 18)

The aims of valuing and strengthening multilingual capabilities are two distinct propositions: respect for cultural diversity is an overarching principle, necessary as a starting point but not sufficient to enact change, while strengthening multilingualism requires more tangible and measurable actions (Putjata, 2018, p. 263).

In the field of multilingualism there have been relatively few studies of LMS in Latin American communities in Australia (Diaz, 2003; Jones-Diaz, 2011). This is notable given that the last decade has seen a surge of migration from Latin America; in Melbourne especially, Spanish has emerged as a major language within the CALD community as one of the top 10 languages spoken other than English (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). The demographic with the highest figures across all Spanish speaking communities in Melbourne are those in the 25–44 age bracket, which is significant because most families with young children fall within this age range. Amongst all the Spanish speaking countries represented in Melbourne, Colombians and Chileans make up the largest Spanish speaking communities (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). In this article, I will be investigating the language maintenance challenges that Spanish speaking families from Colombia and Chile experience, what health professionals these families may have consulted, and whether and how they incorporated their advice into their FLP.

My research questions for this study are as follows:

1. What language maintenance challenges do Spanish speaking families experience in Australia?

2. How does advice from health professionals impact FLP?

To explore these research questions, I chose to conduct interviews with Spanish speaking parents from Colombia and Chile. In the sections that follow I will briefly outline the methodology and participant profiles before exploring the reported experiences of my participants with health professionals. I will then conclude with recommendations for future research regarding FLP and professional practice based on the findings from this study.

2. Methodology

Thirteen Spanish speaking mothers living in Melbourne were interviewed for a study that explored HL maintenance and FLP (Grasso, 2018). The participants chosen had all migrated from Colombia and Chile, the two countries with the highest representation of Spanish speakers in Australia respectively (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Mothers were selected for interview as they are typically the primary caregiver for their child who most commonly accompanies them to health services, regardless of whether they are stay-at-home parents or working mothers. As mothers generally spend the most time with their children in early childhood when their language is developing, they also have the most influence on the transmission and maintenance of their heritage language. This is especially true of Latin American families in Australia (Martin, 2011). Stay-at-home fathers were not included in this study, not just because they are smaller in number, but because it was considered that they would face different challenges which would be worthy of a separate investigation.

Participants were recruited for interviews via a social media call out on social networking Facebook sites and referrals from my own social network. As a researcher-interviewer who had worked closely with the Spanish speaking community as a National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) certified interpreter in Melbourne, I was able to offer my participants the opportunity to be interviewed in the language they were most comfortable in, without the need for an external interpreter. Eleven of the 13 participants whose experiences are presented in this article chose to be interviewed in Spanish. As a NAATI certified translator, I have carried out the translations of the excerpts from the interviews that are presented in-text.

The interviews were recorded using Voice Memo and the file names were stored under a pseudonym for privacy purposes. I undertook a verbatim transcription of interview recordings, annotated the transcripts in Microsoft Word and created summaries of my annotations to clarify my thoughts and reflections. All identifying details of the participants and their families were either modified or removed to protect their anonymity.

I chose to transcribe the interviews using a naturalized approach in order to accurately capture the data, but I opted for a denaturalized approach when presenting excerpts for coherence and clarity. Because I conducted all the interviews and personally transcribed each of the recordings within days of the interviews, I was confident that the transcriptions would be accurately recorded. I was also able to engage in critical self-reflection when it came to making choices between what features to include or omit in the excerpts out of sensitivity and respect to how my participants would like to see themselves represented in text (Oliver et al., 2005, p. 13).

Constantinou et al. (2017) suggest reordering and reanalysing transcripts, since order of analysis could bias results. This implies that if the interviews were read and analysed in chronological order, it is possible that the initial interviews would be afforded greater attention and therefore the latter interviews could be overlooked during the analysis. Therefore, once all interviews had been completed, I conducted a secondary round of analysis starting from the final interview, doing a close read, adding or editing the annotations of the interview transcripts, and working back in reverse chronological order. I employed a mixture of open and selective coding using a thematic approach, and a content-based analysis was undertaken of the transcribed interviews. I identified primary and sub-themes, as represented in Table 2.

Table 2 Themes

Ideology	Family	Responses to LMS	HL management
Decision to use HL	Partner	Embarrassment	Strategies
Identity	Extended family	Encouragement	Challenges
HL benefits	–	Regrets	Future plans

I created a matrix matching the participants to the themes that emerged during the interview and established links between the contexts, expectations and experiences of the participants. In the HL management category, I discovered that half of my participants reported interactions with health professionals which either supported or hindered their FLP.

My study primarily draws from discourse analysis, specifically Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). I use CDA to examine how the macro level of group ideology regarding multilingualism features in the interviews I conduct with participants, in addition to the meso level of discourse around social practice in health service contexts (Van Dijk, 1997) and the micro level of FLP (King, 2016; King & Fogle, 2006). Socially driven discourse around multilingualism can inform and bridge the gap between HL communities and majority language speakers through advocacy, education and support for HLs at an institutional level. Conversely, this same socially driven discourse can overtly or inadvertently reinforce social inequalities.

2.1 Participants

Table 3 and the text below provide a brief profile of the participants whose experiences are discussed in this article. All time periods and ages specified refer to the time when the interviews were conducted in 2018.

Table 3 Participant profile

Participant	Country of origin	Years in Australia	FLP	Partner ethnicity	Language used between partners	No. of children	Age of children
Viviana	Chile	4	Mixed languages	Colombian	Spanish	1	3
Teresa	Chile	3	Mixed languages	Chilean	Spanish	1	3
Diana	Chile	6	Mixed languages	Australian	English	2	5 & 1.5
Alicia	Chile	6	Mixed languages	Australian	English	2	5 & 1.5
Claudia	Chile	7	MLAH	Chilean	Spanish	2	10 & 2
Eliana	Chile	2	MLAH	Chilean	Spanish	2	5 & 1.5
Carolina	Chile	2	MLAH	Chilean	Spanish	1	1.5
Maria Laura	Chile	3	OPOL: Spanish as lingua franca	German	Spanish	1	2.2
Mirta	Colombia	5	OPOL: English as lingua franca	Bosnian	English	1	1.6
Juliana	Colombia	6	OPOL: English as lingua franca	Australian	English	1	1.7
Elena	Colombia	8	MLAH	Colombian	Spanish	2	5 & 3
Angelica	Colombia	9	OPOL: English as lingua franca	Israeli	English	1	1.6
Liliana	Colombia	10	MLAH	Colombian	Spanish	1	2.6

There were eight Chilean and five Colombian participants, and within each national group there was a fairly even spread of children’s age ranges and years that parents spent living in Australia (min = 2; max = 10). On average the Colombian cohort had spent longer in Australia. There was a 60/40% split between families with one and two children, respectively.

Half of the participants had Spanish speaking partners with whom they spoke Spanish at home; most of these families followed a MLAH approach, with the exception of Viviana and Teresa who had started mixing languages more often with their children. Alicia, Juliana and Diana were married to Australians and their lingua franca was English; both Alicia and Diana reported originally having followed an OPOL strategy which had evolved into mixing languages as their children grew and exhibited a preference for English. Both Mirta and Maria Laura followed an OPOL approach: Mirta’s husband spoke English with her and Bosnian with their daughter, Angelica’s husband also spoke English with her and Hebrew to their daughter, while Maria Laura’s husband spoke Spanish with her and German with their daughter.

All mothers interviewed were the primary caregivers in the family. Half of the interviewees were still at home with their children full time, namely Liliana, Maria Laura, Elena, Angelica, Eliana and Mirta. Mirta reported that while she had been studying she had employed a Colombian nanny to look after her daughter full time rather than send her to childcare. Amongst those who were working or studying, Viviana and Claudia sent their children to childcare once or twice a week, while Juliana, Liliana and Alicia’s children were enrolled in childcare twice a week. At the higher end of the scale, Diana and Eliana’s sons went to childcare three times a week and Teresa’s son had full time childcare arrangements. This is important in terms of seeing how parents and professionals manage LMS issues that may arise with childcare attendance, given that increased exposure to majority language speaking caregivers and peers at childcare has shown to lead to language shift (Verdon et al., 2014). This will be particularly pertinent to parents such as Diana, Eliana and Teresa, whose children frequent childcare more often.

3. Results

This section details the experiences of the language maintenance challenges that each participant encountered as their children began to enter English speaking environments, the extent of the advice they received from health professionals, and what impact this had on their FLP.

3.1 Standing out, fitting in

This first section shows how varying levels of confidence in the FLP and pushback from children can impact language maintenance, and the role health professionals play in fostering engagement with HL or addressing concerns around LMS.

3.1.1 Elena

With a Spanish speaking husband and sister-in-law living close by, Elena was quite confident that her children were being exposed to enough Spanish, and she and her Colombian husband were united in their MLAH approach. Even so, Elena reported that her children would sometimes speak in English, either amongst themselves or directly to her. When I asked her how she managed this, particularly with her eldest daughter, she responded:

Excerpt 1

E: I keep speaking in Spanish and she keeps answering me in English and it’s perfect for me. I don’t want to put pressure on her because otherwise she’d say, “I don’t want to speak in Spanish!” and she wouldn’t want to keep talking to me otherwise. Sometimes when she answers me I say to her, “Can you tell me how you would say that in Spanish?” and she says it perfectly so I’m like oh OK.

The main strategy that Elena had adopted when her daughter shifted into English was the Move on strategy (Lanza, 1997), whereby she continued the conversation with her daughter in Spanish without commenting on the fact that her daughter was responding in English. For Elena, knowing that her daughter was capable of expressing herself in Spanish but was simply choosing not to was a choice that she felt comfortable with. Elena viewed her daughter’s shift into English as a normal reflection of her environment and was untroubled by her mixing languages.

Elena felt supported by her midwife and the child health nurses she had encountered to date. She reported that they had not provided specific advice, but that they had instilled confidence in her and her daughters, who were five and three at the time of interview:

Excerpt 2

E: The midwife always said, “it’s so great that you’re speaking in Spanish, that you know another language” and sometimes she’d say things like “Hola” or “Cómo estás”. And she thought it was fantastic. As for the others, all of the girls’ developmental checks were good and they would praise them and encourage them to keep speaking in Spanish … in one of the [child health] appointments with Clarita [Elena’s daughter], they gave us a storybook in Spanish.

This proactive engagement and reinforcement of Spanish as a desirable and relevant language was also reflected in Elena’s reports of her older daughter’s attitude towards her HL and willingness to use it:

Excerpt 3

E: Clarita always has her little antennas up to see who is speaking in Spanish to speak in Spanish with them! … As Clarita always says, “it’s always so great to speak in Spanish” and she gets so excited to speak in Spanish at school, and even in kinder she did the same thing.

Elena’s daughter is clearly modelling the attitudes and behaviours that support and promote HL use from the health professionals in the community she has encountered. This also concurs with previous studies (Gibbons & Ramirez, 2004; Kath & Del Río, 2022; Martin, 2011; Mejía, 2016) which consistently found that Latin Americans report feeling warmly received and integrated as a CALD community in Australia. By demonstrating high levels of inheritance and affiliation for the Spanish language (Rampton, 1990), the positive affect created by this socialization into their HL has been a proven predictor of higher rates of language maintenance (Cho, 2000; Jones-Diaz, 2011; Kopeliovich, 2010). Elena’s level of confidence could also be attributed to her MLAH approach, but as we shall see in the following case of Viviana, family composition and FLP are not assured indicators of seamless transmission of and engagement with the HL.

3.1.2 Viviana

Viviana was still building her confidence in English and was attending English language classes at an intermediate level. She worked part time and was studying part time, so she sent her daughter to childcare once or twice a week when both she and her husband were at work or in class. However, at the time of interview her mother-in-law was also staying with them on a tourist visa and providing informal childcare. Everyone in the household spoke Spanish together, so the FLP followed was ostensibly MLAH.

In spite of the Spanish immersion environment in the home, Viviana reported that her daughter was increasingly responding to her in English, and she also sometimes felt the need to speak to her in English to ease her transition into childcare. Additionally, the struggle that she and her husband were going through to learn English as adults also made her sensitive to communication barriers that her daughter might be experiencing and made her self-conscious when she spoke Spanish in public. By shifting to English to try and fit in, she noted that her daughter was also beginning to shift and mix languages with her:

Excerpt 4

V: I’ve tried to speak to her one hundred percent in Spanish. But many times if we go out with a group of mums who are completely Australian, for example, for me it’s like I feel embarrassed speaking to her in Spanish because everyone looks at us, so when that happens I speak to her in English. And many times she only speaks to me in English. If they come over to our house I speak completely in English.

S: Is that just because they look at you or because they say something or … ?

V: No no no, it’s because they’re all like “what are you saying?”, if you get what I mean … she understands that we speak another language. But even so it’s difficult because sometimes she only wants to speak in English.

S: And what do you do in those moments?

V: I correct her, like, “in English we say this, but in Spanish you can also say it another way”.

S: And how does she respond when you say that?

V: She says [adopts resigned tone] “Fine … OK” [sighs]. So it’s complicated because she’s only learning and I don’t want to put too much pressure on her. I’m always like, “in Spanish you say this and in English you say this”, because I also have to build up her English on the side. She goes to childcare only once or twice a week, and even so sometimes at childcare she’s exposed to so much English that she gets lost. So you have to build up her English a bit.

It’s unsurprising to hear Viviana comment that her daughter sometimes only wants to speak in English when Viviana is mixing due to her discomfort with the attention she draws to herself when she speaks in Spanish. Viviana is trying to moderate her daughter’s preference for English with a Repetition approach (Lanza, 1997), and is also conscious of reinforcing her daughter’s English language skills because she is concerned about her transition to an English-only language environment at childcare. Viviana reported that she had been worried about her daughter’s confusion and had taken her concerns to her GP:

Excerpt 5

V: When she started childcare, she would ask for things in Spanish. They didn’t understand her, so afterwards she would get home and she would speak to us only in English. I think that at the start she was super confused about language, and because I was a worried mum I went to the doctor and asked him about it and he said no, that this was normal, and that when they start school is when they even out. And that they’ll start speaking a lot in either English or Spanish. Well here it will be English since we’re in an English speaking country and of course she’ll prefer speaking in English. So for us as parents we have an obligation to build up her Spanish … it’s difficult because sometimes she only wants to speak in English.

Viviana expressed concern that her daughter was using Spanish at childcare and not being understood, and then using English with the family once she got home. Her GP had advised Viviana that children’s language mixing would resolve once they got to school, but in the meantime, with her daughter just three years of age and school a long way off, Viviana had to make choices about her FLP. On the one hand, she felt “an obligation to build up her Spanish”, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to pressure her daughter into speaking Spanish if she didn’t want to. Viviana’s worries about her daughter being overwhelmed by so much English exposure at childcare also raised a competing obligation “to build up her English a bit”. This turned out to be a reflection of the advice that her GP had given her:

Excerpt 6

V: Ever since she was born, he always recommended that we talk to her one hundred percent in Spanish at home. Our GP is Australian but he always told us that we should encourage her to speak English because it was going to be very important, I mean, also considering our plans to stay here in Australia, and hopefully to get [permanent] residency. Which means that for her it’s super important. So, we should encourage her to speak English, but most of all Spanish.

This contradictory advice – to speak Spanish one hundred percent at home, but also to encourage her to speak English – seemed to fuel the very practice of language mixing that Viviana was worried about. When I asked Viviana if her GP had given her any further advice about how to address her concerns about her daughter’s language mixing, she replied:

Excerpt 7

V: He told me that it was normal, that children absorb so much – really everything that you say, and that they take it in and store it in their brain, so I shouldn’t worry, that the important thing was that she was learning, that she was developing well, and that she was managing two languages, and that for someone so little it’s super admirable because, you know, my husband and I came to Australia at twenty five years of age, and it was much more difficult to learn one hundred percent. It’s like learning to talk again. But it’s a constant struggle, day after day … it’s been a tough job, often she just doesn’t speak in – she mixes a lot of words in a sentence, and she speaks in Spanish and in English, but I guess it’s part of the process.

Despite being assured by her GP that delay and mixing was a normal part of her language development, Viviana still seemed hesitant to accept this, clarifying this with “I guess it’s part of the process” (my italics), and less certain about what to do in the meantime while her daughter was struggling with confusion at childcare.

3.1.3 Teresa

Both Teresa and her husband worked full time and her son had full time childcare arrangements. Though Teresa endeavoured to follow a MLAH approach with her son, this was made complicated by the living situation at home which skewed the FLP to a mixed language approach. As well as her immediate family, Teresa also shared the home with her sister, her auntie and her brother-in-law who had grown up in France and always communicated in English with the family. Therefore, her son was also exposed to English in the home in addition to the Spanish spoken between other members of the family, and his preference was to respond in English no matter what language was spoken to him.

Despite having done extensive research into multilingualism online, and striving to only speak Spanish to her son alongside her Chilean husband, Teresa still found herself falling into the habit of mixing languages with her son. She described her Repetition approach whenever her son addressed her in English:

Excerpt 8

T: I’ve tried to learn how to encourage him to speak in Spanish and one thing is, whenever he speaks to me in English, I respond in Spanish, so for example I’ll say, he’ll be talking about the moon, he’ll say “moon” and I say to him, “mira, moon, luna”. I’ve tried to make him understand that one thing can have two words to describe it. Do you know what I mean? So sometimes he’ll say to me, “mamá, moon, luna”. So he knows. He knows numbers in English and Spanish. Perro, doggy, as well – he has a lot of – he knows how to tell objects by their different names, but anytime he says anything to me, it’s always in English.¹

Teresa was uncertain as to whether this was just a phase that her son would grow out of, or how she could successfully elicit Spanish from her son without conflict, as general advice from friends who were able to preserve an MLAH approach was not yielding the same results with Teresa’s son:

Excerpt 9

T: Friends who have children who are now eight, nine years old who were born here as well – actually we know a Mexican couple whose son is eight years old and he speaks English and Spanish but really really well, really well. And I said to her, “How did you do it?” and she told me that at home it was only, only, only Spanish. Nothing else, nothing else. But it’s difficult for me because sometimes he asks me things in English, and I reply in Spanish. But he keeps speaking to me in English. So at times I tend to reply to him in English so that he’s satisfied with the response. But afterwards I think, “No, why am I making him think that just using English is a form of communication?”, but these are my doubts, maybe it’s his way of speaking at the moment.

I asked Teresa whether she had raised her concerns about her son’s language development at the Maternal and Child Health service, and if they had suggested other, more nuanced strategies, and she responded that the only advice she was provided was as follows:

Excerpt 10

T: We should try to speak only Spanish, our native language, at home, that he would learn English anyway if – it’s the same thing. That if we stay here for a while he’ll learn.

The recommendation to speak only Spanish in the home was well meaning in theory but not particularly effective in practice, given that Teresa’s household was not a Spanish only environment but also included an English speaking family member. As such, this meant that the family had to mix languages in the home to fit him into the conversation, so this generic advice did not apply to Teresa’s home situation.

3.1.4 Alicia

Alicia was working part time and her daughters went to childcare full time where there was a small Spanish component of the curriculum. She also sent her children to a Spanish speaking playgroup, though she admitted that because it was volunteer run and play based, the children tended to speak English to each other. As her husband was Australian, their FLP was one of mixed languages: English when her husband was present to include him in the conversation, and Spanish most of the time when Alicia was alone with her daughters.

For Alicia, having attended a bilingual school as a teenager made her very conscious of the advantages multilingualism afforded her in adulthood and the cognitive benefits she was passing on to her children by raising them in two languages. Alicia’s husband was supportive of their children learning Spanish and he himself was trying to learn and would initiate conversations with her in Spanish to practise. Like Teresa, Alicia had gleaned most of her multilingual parenting advice online, which might also explain why she had a tentative approach to her FLP in a mixed language household, stating:

Excerpt 11

A: I have a theory – I don’t know if it’s true – that if I keep speaking to them in Spanish, something will stick.

Like Viviana and Teresa, Alicia is uncertain whether her approach and the input she can provide was going to yield results in the long run. Alicia also reported that she did sometimes shift into English, primarily due to her daughter’s discomfort with her speaking Spanish amongst non-Spanish speakers:

Excerpt 12

A: Many times I’ve been speaking to them in English because we’ve been in social situations where there are other people around, and my daughter who is now three years old who can already talk says to me, “Mummy, English” when I speak in Spanish and she says, “No no, don’t do it in Spanish, Mummy, don’t do it in Spanish” and she finds it horrible.

S: Oh yeah? And why is that?

A: I think that it embarrasses her because there are other children who don’t speak any Spanish.

S: Like friends, or relatives?

A: Family, or children in the park, or … she knows that it’s something different, that not everyone speaks Spanish, so we try to reinforce the idea that “you’re so lucky that you can learn Spanish, the other children can’t, it’s very important”.

S: And it’s not that anyone has said something to her about Spanish?

A: Not that I know of.

For Alicia’s daughter, speaking Spanish in front of non-Spanish speakers was embarrassing for her, not because anyone had ever teased her about it, but simply because it made her feel different. This reaction, and Alicia’s subsequent shift into English to placate her daughter, is reminiscent also of Teresa’s language shift to “satisfy” her son. However, when it came to health professionals’ discussions around multilingual FLPs, there was a stark contrast between the social concerns that parents reported and the linguistic-based affirmation that was provided.

In light of Alicia’s reports of her daughter’s concerns and her subsequent shift into English, I asked her what advice she had received from any health professional to date about her children’s language development, and she reported that the only discussion she had had with her child health nurse was as follows:

Excerpt 13

A: The advice that the nurse always gives me is, “Are you speaking to them in Spanish? Yeah? Oh ok good, great, keep going!”

This advice, although encouraging, evidently doesn’t take into account situations where children use their agency to reject the HL, as we have seen in Alicia’s, Teresa’s and Viviana’s examples. However, Alicia’s report of blanket encouragement from her MCH nurse was far from being an isolated case; over half of all participants reported similar experiences, as I will expand upon in the following section.

3.2 Positive reinforcement or empty reassurance?

This section showcases the general nature of the MCH discussions around HL maintenance. Apart from Alicia, five other participants – Eliana, Angelica, Juliana, Carolina and Liliana – all unanimously reported that any discussion they had had around HL development has been encouraging but general, with a focus on allaying perceived concerns around English development rather than recommending specific actions or strategies that could support language maintenance. Below is a selection of excerpts that attest to this:

Excerpt 14: Angelica

A: They haven’t said anything to me.

S: Nothing?

A: They’ve encouraged me to speak to her in Spanish. They say “speak to her in Spanish, speak to her in your mother tongue, she’ll learn English in time” and they tell me, “yes, speak to her in Spanish”, but they’ve never said “take a course” or “take her to such and such a place”.

Excerpt 15: Carolina

C: They’ve only asked me what language we speak at home. And I told them Spanish. And they wrote that down and that was it. They asked me, “are you going to keep speaking in Spanish to him?” and I said yes. And that was it.

S: And that was it?

C: They asked if he was going to childcare, I said yes, they said he’ll learn English there. But that was it.

Excerpt 16: Liliana

L: From what I’ve seen, or the sensation that I’ve always had with … in these places or in general with any person who I’ve spoken to it’s like, “They’ll learn in –” or like it’s not an issue – they’re not very worried about that because they say that when he goes to school he’ll learn English in two weeks. I mean the hard part really is maintaining the other language.

S: Sure. But about that, I mean, about maintaining your maternal language, let’s say, did they mention anything?

L: No.

S: No. OK.

L: And you know maybe I haven’t been so worried about that because my husband is Colombian. So in reality I guess Spanish is a constant at home, I never – in fact most of our friends are Colombians and we speak in Spanish all the time. So maybe I’d be more worried about that, asking for help from the consultant if I had an Australian husband. Like trying to ask for resources and help. And I think that in those circumstances maybe it would be very opportune I mean if they were there in some way to assist in the process, I don’t know.

S: But did they already know that you had a partner from another – well, from Colombia as well?

L: No. They haven’t mentioned it. No they don’t – you’re right. They never ask you about language or if you wanted to maintain it or not, you know, it’s like they never talk about it. It’s more about the physical aspect and I don’t know, maybe they didn’t talk about it because they were very young? They’re assuming that the language aspect doesn’t have as great impact as what they’re trying to support which is their physical development, I guess?

What is evident in Liliana’s testimony is that HL maintenance, not English development, was the key area of concern for parents, so the reassurance from Liliana, Angelica and Carolina’s nurses that children will learn English in time is not the reassurance parents are looking for. Assuring parents that their children will learn English at childcare doesn’t address the concerns that parents have about language shift. As numerous studies (Frese et al., 2015; Pauwels, 2005, 2016; Verdon et al., 2014) have demonstrated, a multilingual FLP is regularly challenged when young children are exposed to majority language contexts outside the home such as childcare, and this exposure can lead to sudden and often irreversible language shift.

Liliana’s interview also touches on the problem of co-parent invisibility in consultations, a subject that is explored in greater depth by Mogro-Wilson et al. (2016) and supported by research that promotes including fathers in children’s health care (Forbes et al., 2021; Romanowski, 2022) to better foster HL maintenance.

Liliana’s assertion that child health nurses hadn’t mentioned her son’s HL development was also reported by Mirta and Maria Laura, which was especially significant because their daughters were each learning three languages at home. As Mirta’s brother was a GP, she routinely went to him for advice rather than seek it independently from other health professionals. In Maria Laura’s case, she didn’t feel her HL was particularly threatened by her daughter’s exposure to English outside the home since her German partner spoke German independently to their daughter rather than English, in contrast to households like Teresa’s where mixing in English regularly occurred.

The lack of specific advice forthcoming from child health nurses luckily hadn’t been a deterrent to this set of participants. Carolina, Eliana and Liliana all had the support of Spanish speaking partners and were confidently following an MLAH FLP, while the lingua franca in Maria Laura’s home was Spanish. As for Juliana, Angelica and Mirta, though they did not have Spanish speaking partners, their children were only 18 months old so it could be assumed that the doubts that afflicted parents with older children, such as Viviana, Teresa and Alicia, were not a pressing concern for parents of children who had yet to start speaking or expressing a preference for English.

Though overall parents were focused on developing the HL rather than English, the issue of language delay – in any language – also arose for Claudia and Diana to varying degrees, as I will explore in the next section.

3.3 When language delay is assumed

In this section I focus on the two participants who reported receiving advice specific to language delay from their child health nurses.

3.3.1 Claudia

Claudia was married to a Chilean, worked part time as a Spanish teacher, and sent her youngest son to childcare several times a week. Claudia’s case was slightly different to the other participants in this study, as her older daughter had spent her first few years in a completely Spanish speaking environment growing up in Chile before the family moved to Australia, whereas her two-year-old son had been born in Australia, and she was conscious of the impact that English was having on his language development. Claudia followed a MLAH approach with her two children, but even so she noted that her son was progressing at a slower rate when compared to the same developmental stage of his older sister.

Upon bringing this up with her child health nurse, her nurse gave the following evaluation of her son’s language development:

Excerpt 17

C: She told me that he’s slower because he’s bilingual, because children take longer to process everything.

This entrenched belief that bilingualism results in language delay contrasts with Hambly et al.’s (2013) findings: having conducted a systemic review of language delay in children learning a HL in addition to English, Hambly et al. concluded that:

Findings are inconsistent but in general there is no substantial evidence for typically developing bilingual children acquiring speech sounds at a slower or a faster rate than their monolingual peers. However, it is clear that speech acquisition in bilingual children is qualitatively different from that of monolingual children with different error patterns and rates of progress observed. Patterns of speech acquisition vary in children who are bilingual and there are clear differences between languages with regard to their influence on speech sound development and impairment (p. 2).

Hambly et al.’s study shows that though children such as Claudia’s son will progress at a different rate and demonstrate a distinct pattern of language development from their monolingual peers, there are no set parameters as to if or how long any language delay might ensue as a result of her multilingual upbringing. Being an educator herself, Claudia was very confident in her ability to raise her children in HL and was undeterred by her nurse’s evaluation, however other participants were not as sure, as we will see in the following case of Diana.

3.3.2 Diana

Diana was well versed in multilingual pedagogy as, like Alicia, she had also attended a bilingual high school in Chile. Diana had independently sought out research into multilingualism and language maintenance and initially endeavoured to raise her first child with an OPOL FLP, but she started shifting into English to accommodate her husband whenever he was at home with them. Though Diana’s Australian husband could speak Spanish, he didn’t use Spanish with her or their children at home, and when she spoke to him in Spanish in front of the children, he would respond to her in English, so her FLP started tending towards a mixed languages approach. Diana’s concerns around her FLP and her son’s language development began even before her son went to childcare:

Excerpt 18

D: When he was around two years old, we realized that he wasn’t speaking very much. They talk about all that … communicative development, they say that children should have a certain level of language at certain ages. We realized that Manuel [Diana’s eldest son] was always a little behind. And I read many studies that say that’s normal in bilingual children, but because we were first time parents, we got a bit worried, so we started to look into what we should do. We went to a local nurse, and despite the fact that she was Chinese, she automatically recommended that we start speaking in English instead of Spanish.

S: Was that in the Maternal and Child Health Service?

D: Yes, the nurse. And at the time we took her advice and we started to speak with him more in English.

Though Diana had theoretically anticipated that this delay was “normal in bilingual children”, in practice, as a first time parent, she was nevertheless concerned. She chose to take the advice of the nurse she consulted at the MCH to help ease her son’s delay by changing to a delayed introduction strategy with regards to her HL, and also started seeing a speech pathologist. Diana was reluctant to stop speaking in Spanish, but she was worried about her son’s language development, particularly when he entered childcare, and she scheduled another consult with the speech pathologist:

Excerpt 19

D: Once he started going to childcare at two and a half, we went to the speech pathologist again and they told us that it would be better if we dedicated more time to English so that he would have more language to communicate at childcare and so as not to confuse him. So we made the change quickly, he was going to childcare three times a week and his language went from zero to a hundred. He started speaking much more fluently, he started to put sentences together more quickly, and then he wouldn’t stop talking. But always in English. So for us then, going back to Spanish was much more difficult. When I tried to talk to him at home he … it’s like I felt a kind of rejection … I got the feeling that deep down he really didn’t want to speak in Spanish. And it was much easier to do what he wanted.

Now five years old, Diana’s son only speaks to her in English. Even though she still tries to speak to him in Spanish from time to time, it is an ongoing battle. Disillusioned by the outcome of the advice she had received from both her MCH nurse and the speech pathologist, Diana is now disengaged from health services. With her second child, she is determined to do things differently:

Excerpt 20

D: I’ve hardly taken him to the nurse this time, and I’m not taking any notice of that advice where they say it’s better to speak to him in English because I know, now I realize with Manuel being older, that if I had been more consistent in bringing him up in Spanish he wouldn’t have had difficulties. Maybe he would have taken longer, sure, but he wouldn’t have had the difficulties that he has now incorporating two languages into his speech.

Deeply regretful of having altered her initial OPOL FLP on the advice of the health professionals she consulted, and having more practical experience as a second time parent, Diana is now committed to raising her second son exclusively in Spanish and is adamant that she will not be seeking or following any external advice about his language development.

4. Discussion

In the following discussion, I will explore how and why parental concerns emerged about LMS, and what information parents received from professionals about their FLP.

4.1 Language maintenance challenges

For parents like Elena, raising children in HL had not yet raised language maintenance challenges, but several participants – namely Viviana, Teresa, Alicia and Diana – experienced degrees of shift to a mixed languages approach which caused varying levels of concern amongst them. As their children matured, the strict “one language” approach more often gave way to a “mixed languages” approach, which is consistent with Barron-Hauwaert’s (2004, p. 163) observations that the OPOL method is difficult to maintain amidst the complexities of the multilingual family dynamic.

It could be assumed that Viviana, living as she did in an ideal immersion household following an MLAH approach, would have minimal difficulties in maintaining her daughter’s HL. However, Viviana reported that she had often consulted her GP for advice about HL maintenance, and her ongoing worries demonstrate that just because both parents are HL speakers, this does not necessarily lessen the intensity of the language maintenance challenges they face or their need for information or advice. One often overlooked fact is that educating children in a HL is a task in itself (Nesteruk, 2010, p. 283), and it can be harder to do so when parents are facing other challenges. Viviana described the process of trying to raise her daughter in Spanish and maintain her HL as a “tough job”, which was also compounded by simultaneously working part time, studying part time and taking English classes, all on a temporary student visa, so her concerns about her daughter’s language maintenance were also competing for priority with more generalized concerns.

Being still in a process of second language acquisition herself, and not having been educated in children’s multilingual development, Viviana’s concerns about her daughter’s language development were exacerbated by her own daily struggle with language learning. For parents with less confidence in their majority language abilities, their child’s transition to the majority language environment at childcare is likely to cause them even greater worry that their child might be left out and feel lost (Chumak-Horbatsch, 2008, p. 12). In turn, this may lead to language shift as parents try to scaffold their child’s majority language development by shifting to the majority language with their child. Viviana exhibited anxiety around language learning, so it could be surmised that Viviana was projecting her own anxieties about language and belonging onto her daughter in social situations as a non-majority language speaker (Sevinç & Dewaele, 2018) and to avoid standing out, she sometimes chose to shift into English with her daughter.

Viviana also reported her daughter’s preference for English had arisen since she started attending childcare, and though her initial FLP was to speak to her daughter exclusively in Spanish, she conceded that she often chose to acquiesce to her daughter’s wishes and shift into English. This shift in FLP demonstrates not only the impact of children’s agency in the creation of FLP, but that FLP is not a static, immutable concept but part of a dynamic continuum that requires ongoing reassessment and readjustment (Palviainen, 2020, p. 237). This is especially true when new, unknown and stressful external events occur, such as when children enter a majority language environment at childcare (Hirsch, 2017, p. 69) and become active participants in institutional language practices (Lourêiro & Neumann, 2020, p. 157).

Teresa’s MLAH strategy was destabilized not only due to the influence of the majority language at her son’s full time childcare, but also by the fact that her French brother-in-law also lives with Teresa and her family. Living in a multilingual household means that she faces the same challenges as the participants with English speaking partners who also have to contend with the majority language vying for preferential position in the home. Though her brother-in-law understood Spanish, he spoke back to the family in English, which also included Teresa’s son. This is a clear instance of socializing children into language shift (Smith-Christmas, 2014) by modelling code-switching behaviour, and could explain why Teresa reports that her son repeatedly responds to her in English whenever she speaks to him in Spanish.

Teresa’s need to preserve family harmony and negotiate practices with the family seems to be largely absent from the literature which advocates for LMS from a more utilitarian, structural approach that is outcome rather than process focused (Willoughby, 2019). The struggles that Teresa faces are reminiscent of the Smith-Christmas (2014) case study of a family who negotiate Gaelic FLP in an English speaking environment. They too tried to avoid the trap of talking language shift into being (Gafaranga, 2011) by adopting a “dual-lingualism” (Saville-Troike, 1987) approach of maintaining a conversation in two different languages in the absence of shared linguistic codes. Hua’s (2008) article on duelling languages explained that dual-lingualism in families can also have the function of undermining or challenging an interlocutor’s authority by choosing to speak to them in a language that is not their strongest language, essentially to give the speaker more power in the interaction. This unequal distribution of power and the frustration that can ensue when a child refuses to capitulate to a parent’s entreaties to speak in HL can lead to what De Houwer described as “frustrated” or “conflictive” bilingualism (2020, p. 170), as both Teresa and Viviana reported.

Like many of King and Fogle’s (2006) interviewees who demonstrated only vague references or understanding of literature or theories around LMS, Alicia couldn’t say whether her theory would work in practice and claimed to simply follow her instinct when it came to making decisions around FLP. At the same time, she also allowed that she tried to speak to her children in Spanish “eighty percent” of the time, admitting that she was already mixing languages. Alicia’s tenuous approach to FLP reflects findings that claim that FLP is often spontaneous and unprepared (Okita, 2002; Schwartz, 2010), which can lead to language shift in the absence of an explicit FLP.

For Alicia, mixing languages came about partly as a side effect of speaking regularly to her children in English in the presence of her partner (Piller, 2002), but also due to a similar experience to Viviana, whereby her daughter became anxious around using the HL in the wider community and felt different to the other, assumedly monolingual English speaking children. To combat this aversion to Spanish, Alicia and her husband tried to promote the use of HL by arguing that their daughter should feel lucky to have a skill that other children don’t have. This argument may actually have the opposite effect of making multilingualism less, rather than more, desirable. As Janos et al. (1985) observed, one could imagine that “conceptualizing oneself as different from (i.e. more intellectually capable than) agemates would lead to positive self-regard. On the other hand, a feeling of difference may foster a sense of loneliness and isolation, with the suspicion, therefore, that ‘something must be wrong with me’” (p. 78). If Alicia’s daughter feels she is socially distanced from her peers because of the language she uses, it is understandable that she would seek to close this gap through language shift.

Diana’s experience with language shift had been the most pronounced of this subset of participants. Rather than maintaining a dual-linguistic conversation, Diana would shift into English for the sake of maintaining harmonious bilingualism (De Houwer, 2020). Diana acknowledged that she had originally diverted from her OPOL FLP because she felt that she was excluding her husband from the family dynamic by speaking in Spanish when he didn’t use it, but then introduced a delayed introduction strategy on the advice of a MCH nurse and a speech pathologist who advised the family to speak English only with their son. This method supported his English language development but stymied his HL and resulted in a great reticence to return to Spanish when she attempted to re-introduce it.

Further to this, Diana felt considerable resentment towards her health professionals’ advice to abandon her original OPOL FLP. Diana explained that “because we were first time parents, we were a bit worried”, and this was what prompted her to seek advice and initiate language shift, despite her pre-existing knowledge of multilingual parenting. This is indicative of the challenges of first time parenting (Hsu & Lavelli, 2005, p. 504) and the increased need for information for new parents (Wiklund et al., 2018).

Once her son had established his English language skills at childcare and her worry about language delay had abated, the concern that emerged for Diana was her son’s reluctance to engage with her in HL. Diana conceded that rather than force him to communicate with her in Spanish, she shifted into English because “it was easier to do what he wanted”, an experience also echoed by Teresa who found her son was only truly satisfied when she spoke back to him in English. The perpetuation of Diana and Teresa’s language shift to accommodate their children’s unwillingness to communicate in Spanish, and Diana’s growing concern about the breakdown in their relationship because of this language rift, is also indicative of children’s role as socialization agents in the co-creation of a FLP (Said & Zhu, 2019). This becomes especially evident when they start attending childcare independently and become immersed in a new linguistic and cultural setting that is separate and distinct from that of their parents.

The traditionally held belief that adults lead the FLP process has been challenged by a growing field of FLP researchers who recognize that children’s heightened social and linguistic capabilities as native speakers and “culture brokers” (Alvarez, 2017; Jones & Trickett, 2005) can lead to children determining FLP rather than their parents (Luykx, 2005, p. 1408; Smith-Christmas, 2020, p. 218). Over time, children’s resistance and refusal to engage in HL with parents wears them down and leads to language shift (Gafaranga, 2011, p. 132; Smith-Christmas, 2014, p. 515). As Larsen-Freeman (2019) observes, “second language learners are not mere processors of input, nor are they mere products of socialisation” (p. 73). As children transition to a majority language environment at childcare, they adapt to a new social and linguistic context and also begin to assert their own FLP preferences in the home.

4.2 Health professionals’ advice

All the health professionals that my participants consulted were supportive of the families’ multilingual FLP, however in practice their advice did not adequately address the challenges that families were facing or provide accurate or comprehensive advice.

Viviana’s GP recommended that she should reinforce her daughter’s English language, so by mixing English and Spanish she was following his advice, even though it conflicted from the idealized “Spanish only” FLP that he also advised. Exactly how Viviana could support her child’s English development without engaging her in English – and thereby modelling the language mixing that she was so concerned about in her daughter – did not appear to have been explained. Her GP’s reassurance that her three-year-old’s mixing would “even out” once she got to school was simply too long for her to wait. Ultimately, reassurance without accompanying strategies (Narayanan et al., 2010, p. 62) was not enough to allay Viviana’s immediate concerns about her daughter’s perceived confusion without resorting to English.

Both Teresa and Alicia had similar experiences at the MCH where they were encouraged to speak in Spanish, but not given any other more nuanced advice around approaches or strategies that they might be able to put into practice with their children when they rejected the HL. This could include the parental discourse strategies posited by Lanza (1997) to respond to mixing or dual-lingualism, and/or advocacy for a more holistic approach that recognizes both linguistic ability and strategic use of language in parent and child repertoires (Danjo, 2018, p. 4) so that parents might feel more empowered to mix languages or switch between languages.

Claudia’s reports of her MCH nurse equating her child’s language delay with bilingualism, and the recommendations from both Diana’s nurse and her speech pathologist to stop speaking in Spanish to her child and just speak in English to manage language delay, are both areas for attention. They raise questions as to what training is being provided to equip health professionals to appropriately respond to questions around language development and LMS for multilingual families, especially when concerns arise. Ongoing research continues to show that professional knowledge about multilingualism is at a deficit (Bedore et al., 2011, p. 1; Caporal-Ebersold, 2018, p. 14; Lee & Oxelson, 2006, p. 465; Yu, 2013, p. 21), to the detriment of the families they work with. Bedore et al. (2011) suggest that early childhood professionals “are often uncertain as to how to effectively work with children from diverse backgrounds because they do not know enough about cultural and linguistic diversity and its impact on language development” (p. 1). Yu (2013) explains that HL maintenance can be compromised by health professionals who are not aware of intergenerational language practices in multilingual families and advise to speak English only where there are any concerns about children’s language development. These views included beliefs that multilingualism caused delay, mixing generated confusion and HL use had a negative impact on English acquisition, all of which is likely to precipitate language shift in families who consult these professionals for guidance in their FLP practice.

We have seen that the issues that can arise when parents send their children to early childhood education are not acknowledged by child health nurses, who focus on the benefits of rapid acquisition of English without offering advice about how parents can address the language shift that occurs when children are regularly exposed to the majority language (King & Mackay, 2007). Additionally, parents often assume that nurses lack knowledge about multilingual development because what knowledge that is shared is perceived as generic and not evidence-based (Bedore et al., 2011; Yu, 2013), which was unanimously reported by Carolina, Liliana, Angelica, Eliana and Juliana, while Maria Laura and Mirta commented that they hadn’t even considered asking their child health nurses about their children’s language development. Reassurance plays a large part in nursing (Akyirem et al., 2022), yet the focus on encouragement and building parents’ confidence without reference to evidence has also been perceived as valueless “empty reassurance” (Armstrong, 1983, p. 458) that does not do enough (Gibb & O’Brien, 1990). Without addressing the root causes of parental concerns around HL or providing practical or proactive strategies, the doubt and anxiety around their FLP can lead parents to abandon efforts to communicate with their children in HL. This occurs especially as children grow older and it becomes more difficult to maintain consistency when communicating with them and managing other relationships with non-HL speakers.

5. Conclusion

In this study, we have observed some of the language maintenance challenges that Spanish speaking parents experience, how they respond to these challenges, and what advice was provided to them by the health professionals they consulted.

There is a general sense of uncertainty around FLP from many of the participants, regardless of family composition or FLP approach, that reveals an opportunity for health professionals to address these concerns in a more nuanced way. As we have seen, advocating for consistent use of the HL is not always possible due to individual circumstances and children’s growing preference for the majority language, particularly as they transition to childcare.

Though multilingualism has been recognized and promoted as preferred practice in the state of Victoria (Department of Education and Training [Victoria], 2022), at a level of practice there is a lack of engagement with LMS beyond positive reinforcement of the HL, which, while encouraging as a sign of support for multilingual families, is not enough to support language maintenance when language challenges and concerns arise. Additionally, though advocating language shift to the majority language may quickly resolve problems around perceived delay, mixing or confusion, it can create another problem that is very hard to undo; namely, temporary language shift that can become permanent.

Reassurance around multilingual parenting has been demonstrated to be most effective when paired with evidence-based reasons which explain why a multilingual FLP wouldn’t confuse a child (Drysdale et al., 2015; Park, 2014). Additionally, moving beyond generic advice to specific approaches and strategies that parents can utilize when children refuse to speak in HL can empower parents to maintain their HL and help prevent language shift. The mixed language approach can be adopted for ease of communication, and strategies such as Time and Place (De Houwer, 2020) can be implemented to use the majority language in situations where parents feel it is safer, more inclusive or more convenient not to use HL. This is a point that is widely expressed anecdotally by parents but seldom addressed by the literature in the multilingualism field, which tends to frame mixing as an ideological right of expression, rather than a choice made for more pragmatic reasons. Parents may choose to mix languages to promote harmonious bilingualism by accommodating children’s emerging preference for the majority language and so as not to exclude their co-parents, family members or other interlocuters who don’t speak the HL (De Houwer, 2020, p. 72). Additionally, parents may opt to use the majority language in lieu of the HL in the community when they feel threatened or simply don’t want to draw attention to themselves (Pascual y Cabo & Rivera-Marín, 2021, p. 10).

On this point, we have also observed a need to normalize multilingualism in majority language settings to assuage anxieties around difference and belonging. This opens up possibilities for interdisciplinary socio-linguistic research to investigate ways this can be achieved in the ongoing movement towards shifting Australia’s monolingual mindset (Clyne, 2005).

As this study has focused on a small sample of Spanish speakers from the Chilean and Colombian communities living in Melbourne, these findings are not intended to represent the experience of all Latin Americans in Australia, and subsequent studies could be expanded to look at greater numbers of Spanish speakers from different countries of origin or other language communities, either as standalone or comparative studies. Future studies could also concentrate on specific health professionals with an interest and expertise in language development, as this study only provides a limited study of health advice from different practitioners (e.g. child health nurses, midwives, doctors and speech pathologists). What these findings do demonstrate is a need for greater practitioner support for all CALD communities wishing to maintain their HL (Cardona et al., 2008, p. 84; Jones-Diaz, 2011, p. 278). The experiences shared by this study’s participants present an opportunity for researchers to work with health professionals as part of an interdisciplinary and socially informed approach to LMS (Willoughby, 2018, p. 135) to study what resources, training and professional development currently exists around multilingual development and language maintenance in Australia, and how best practice and opportunities for improvement could lead to better HL outcomes for children as they transition to majority language environments.

Consent

All participants provided informed consent by signing a consent form prior to being interviewed.

Ethics committee approval

Ethical approval (No. 2018-13473) for this study was obtained from Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC) on 7 May 2018.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my study participants who generously gave their time and shared their experiences: les agradezco mucho. I am very grateful to Associate Professor Louisa Willoughby for her supervision of my original Honours thesis which this paper draws from, as well as the helpful feedback provided by two peer reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, SG, upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne Grasso

Suzanne Grasso works as a Spanish interpreter and translator, teaching associate and research consultant. She is a PhD candidate at Monash University where she is investigating the role of health professionals in supporting parents to raise their children in their heritage languages. Her research interests include intercultural communication, multilingualism, heritage language maintenance, language education and language policy.

Notes

1 Mira: look; luna: moon; mama: mum; perro: dog.