THE NETHERLANDS - A couple of years ago I read the speech “A Borderless World” by Patricia Evangelista, who at age 19 won the International Public Speaking Competition in London on May 2004. She wrote about the Filipino diaspora - the voluntary and involuntary dispersion and immigration of Filipinos worldwide.

To quote from her speech: “There are those who disapprove of Filipinos who choose to leave. I used to. Maybe this is a natural reaction of someone who was left behind, smiling for family pictures that get emptier with each succeeding year. Desertion, I called it. My country is a land that has perpetually fought for the freedom to be itself. Our heroes offered their lives in the struggle against the Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans. To pack up and deny that identity is tantamount to spitting on that sacrifice.

True, there is no denying this phenomenon, aided by the fact that what was once the other side of the world is now a 12-hour plane ride away. But this is a borderless world, where no individual can claim to be purely from where he is now...”

I, too, am a part of the Filipino diaspora, along with the 11 million Filipinos scattered around the world. There are those in it for the financial and career opportunities. I started out on the same path but ended up married to a foreigner. Thus my story is of vying for permanent residency here in the Netherlands where my husband is a native.

As the world become borderless, relationships too became borderless. Families with multicultural origins are now common. My immediate family is a good example. My husband was born Dutch but his roots are half Russian and half Serbian. His older brother is married to a Dutch lady of Afghan origin. The youngest sibling is based in Spain, living with a Spanish partner.

Moving to a new country with different cultures, and especially a different language, is a difficult transition. Good thing we Filipinos have a knack for adapting to our environment. Growing up with both Filipino and English, it’s easier for us to be mainstreamed in English-speaking societies. But I did not foresee that at 32 years of age I would be adding a third language to my list. Compounding the challenges are issues on raising children as multicultural parents.

Being parents to a 16-month old and another little bundle of joy in a couple of weeks, we had to make choices on how best to raise our children in our multicultural family. We needed to find a way to give our children a cultural heritage amid the different cultures in our family and in our present environment –the Netherlands itself being a very mixed cultural environment.

Raising children is not easy. If only children came with instruction manuals. But they don’t and neither does anyone tell you what to do when you have a toddler eager to learn about the world while faced with different languages and practices. Good thing I have an early childhood education background that has served me well as an educator and now as a parent. I can rely on what I know and what current practices are pointing to on how to raise children in multicultural settings, particularly in language learning.

This is what I know, on which we have partially based our decision to have a multilingual family:

Brain research in the past few years has helped parents re-shape their parenting styles and strategies. What our own parents didn’t know about how brain activity affects the child’s growth and development, is information we have at our fingertips. “What to” and “how to” are prevalent in parenting books and the Internet.

A good example of how new understanding has impacted on families is the use of different languages at home. Bilingualism or multilingualism was a big no-no in olden times. The old prejudice is that multilingualism confuses children, who will learn neither their own nor the other language (s). But recent research has provided evidence 0f the opposite: Children who grow up multilingual in their early years are more perceptive and intellectually more flexible.

Studies have proven three valuable points on language learning:

First, language development begins early. An infant is capable of responding to sounds even 10 weeks before birth; infants are more receptive to sound than adults. The sponge-like capacity of the infant’s brain to distinguish the sound of different languages is immense. It is from infancy till early childhood that connections to the brain are rapidly made, due in fact to the bombardment of experiences.

Second, it is during the first years in life that the brain is in its most flexible and critical stage. Experts now agree that the critical period for native-like language skills (time in the early stages in life where it displays a heightened sensitivity to certain environmental experiences) ends gradually at around six or seven years of age. This reinforces what we know about the importance of early experiences.

Third, parents provide the means for language learning. Brain development information simply affirms much of what early childhood experts have been suggesting for years - the development of language is tremendously influenced by parent-child interactions.

Taking advantage of these facts, families today are given an option on how best to promote language learning at home. For multicultural families like ours the choice was made for us by our composition. The questions were more about which languages and how many.

Our daughter is naturally expected to learn the native language of the country we are in. Dutch is the native language spoken to her by my husband. My in-laws, on the other hand, are exposing her to their native tongue - Serbian. As for me, the choice was a bit more difficult. Should I teach her Filipino or English?

Providing meaningful language exposure is the goal and since my husband and I communicate in English, it was inevitable that I speak English to our daughter. Why should it be so? Researchers claim that going beyond four languages simultaneously is difficult for very young children and the success rate starts to fall significantly.

A child also needs to be exposed to a language 30% of their waking time to actively speak it. Since our daughter’s exposure to the first three languages is more than that, it was decided that this is the best approach for the moment, at least for the first five years of her life.

Making use of the One Person One Language (OPOL) system, we know we’re on the right track of promoting multilingualism in our family. This means that the parents and other caregivers consistently speak only one language each to the child. Given that growing up in a multilingual environment is the fastest and easiest way to learn a foreign language – a plus factor in today’s society – and that being multilingual also affects analytical, social and academic skills, we feel we are really giving our daughter and future children a better head start in life.

But the deciding factor in our decision to teach different languages to our little one is for her to be attached to her cultural roots. Having more contact with her grandparents, it is important for her to be able to relate to them. Being a Dutch citizen also means that she needs to have a firm grasp of the language speciallywhen she enters school. And English? It was a choice of convenience since it is also the language she hears a lot between me and my husband.

With our daughter a product of the Filipino diaspora, I feel it is also my task to let her know about her Filipino heritage. Although learning the language will come in time, for now her Filipino roots are not at all lost as she is exposed to food and practices like being called “Ate Katie” at home. In a few more years our little Katie will be adding Filipino to her repertoire, with me making sure that she would have the same affinity for my native tongue as the rest of the languages she is learning now.

In the words of Patricia Evangelista “A borderless world doesn’t preclude the idea of a home. I’m a Filipino, and I’ll always be one.” Our daughter too will know that wherever she is in the world, she is also a Filipino and will always be one.

Lana Flores Jelenjev describes herself as a passionate educator, mother and wife. She has been in the field of early childhood education for over a decade and feels she has insights to share, particularly with women raising their children in a multicultural family.

She graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree on Family Life and Child Development and has done preschool and collegiate level teaching, given trainings to educators and parents, and has been an academic consultant for preschools.

Munting Nayon News Magazine