Most Recent Posts
NEW! The Perfect Book for Parents Raising Bilingual Kids
Just in time for Christmas! I WANT TO BE BILINGUAL! is the perfect book for parents—especially new parents and parents of younger kids—who dream of raising bilingual or multilingual children. Written by Adam Beck, author of the popular guide Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability, this playful book is a unique “picture book for adults” with delightful illustrations by Pavel Goldaev. Narrated by a lively baby, the book emphasizes the most important information parents need for realizing joyful success on a
Reflections on My Five Weeks in Europe, Part 5: Back to Japan, and Back to Our Key Habits and Routines
One of the core principles for successfully raising bilingual or multilingual children (key question #6 in 45 Key Questions Every Parent Raising a Bilingual Child Should Ask) is this: Effective habits and routines that can provide the child with ample exposure in the target language, and create regular opportunities for him or her to use this language actively, must be made and sustained—and reshaped, as necessary—over the years of childhood. In our case, for example, some of my long-running habits and
Reflections on My Five Weeks in Europe, Part 4: The Sweet Joy of Playing with Small Children
The adorable three-year-old girl was sitting on the stairs, telling me all about her “babies”—her dolls and stuffed animals that were adorned with band-aids (“plasters” she called them, in the British English she spoke) because, she said, they were ill or had gotten injured. And at that moment, in my very first homestay of the trip, I flashed on my own daughter when she was the same small, incredibly-cute age and I suddenly missed that time terribly. A large lump
Reflections on My Five Weeks in Europe, Part 3: Lunch with Simon Farrow
Another special highlight from my trip was the opportunity to meet in person, for the very first time, the artist who worked so hard on the illustrations for my novel, How I Lost My Ear, a funny, action-packed epic for older children and adults that was published in January 2018. In fact, before we met, I had spoken to him only once, over Skype, and that was just briefly. Otherwise, we communicated through email: many, many, many messages over the
Reflections on My Five Weeks in Europe, Part 2: Old Friends, New Friends
I met many people on my trip through Europe, and most of them I was meeting for the very first time. I suppose, then, that I should call them “new friends,” but in fact, they felt much more like “old friends” for these two reasons: I had already gotten to know them quite well through my work online: through my blog and my forum, through email, and even through Skype. I feel a special kinship with other parents of bilingual
Reflections on My Five Weeks in Europe, Part 1: Gratitude
One of my very favorite quotes, from Meister Eckhart, is this: If the only prayer you say in your entire life is ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice. As I sit here at my kitchen table, in my small house in Hiroshima, Japan, I struggle to begin writing about my five weeks in Europe. It was such a big experience for me, in so many ways, that sharing it in some orderly fashion feels overwhelming. So, rather than one long post,
