Raising Multilingual Children (or Not) March 20, 2012, 5:00 pm Marcus Mabry, editor at large at The International Herald Tribune, is raising his twins to be trilingual, an act of parental aggression that I'm having a hard time not taking personally. It's not even that either he, or his partner, speaks another language as a native. It's just that he's trying to do what's best for them, and so he speaks to them only in French, while their nanny speaks to them in Mandarin, and his partner speaks English. Those twins are going to be well prepared for their international life, and, if Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, writing in the Sunday Review, is right, smarter than the average single-language speaking child (mine). Actually, despite my sarcasm, I'm appreciative of his efforts - any American who has traveled overseas knows that if more of us spoke a second language, we'd have, if nothing else, a better international reputation. But the issue of bilingual children is one of the few that sparks my inner sense of parental regret and inadequacy, because not only did I have good intentions in this respect that have largely failed, but also, I'm the mother of a child who was raised in China until she was nearly 4 years old, and for a series of complex reasons, most out of my control, she speaks no Chinese - not Mandarin, and not another dialect, either. I know that you can't give your children everything. This idea of adding a second language (let alone a third) became too complex for us; in short, it was too much work. That magic window when language acquisition is effortless has closed. Did any of you raise children who spoke a second language that wasn't your own, and how did you bring it off? And what skills - like language - do you regret not fostering in your own kids?