Media and Language

I don’t hate Winnie-the-Pooh. In fact, I love the “chubby little tubby all stuffed with fluff.”  But I had to say “No!” when my mom asked to bring our daughter to the Winnie-the-Pooh movie.  Objections to Disney’s commoditization of childhood aside, my husband and I use the small amount of TV and video “screen time” we permit our three-year-old daughter as a tool to glamorize and create excitement about her second language, Russian.  One of the most beloved videos our daughter and her papa watch together is, you guessed it, “Vinnie Pookh.”

As anyone with a child and a TV knows, TV is exciting for kids and imparts high status to the words and language associated with it.  In our monolingual U.S. culture, using TV to promote our family’s minority language makes sense for us.   We have developed a system we like and now have to stick to our program, enforce it with our daughter, and communicate about it in a way that garners support from our daughter’s other caregivers.

Children are exposed to many types of “media” in a variety of everyday settings, including books, TV, interactive toys, music, and the now ubiquitous computer.  As parents, we mediate this environment; our children are exposed to these media to the extent that we provide and permit access.  Of course, the younger our children are, the more influence we parents have.  The choices we make for our children about their access to media are based on our values.  Regardless of how many languages are spoken at home, all parents face media-related choices, including how much time will be spent on entertainment, the degree and quantity of sexual and violent content we will tolerate, and how much discretion we allow our children over what they read, view and listen to. 

As parents of bilingual children, we have an additional criterion for our choices amongst media:  Which culture and language does this type of media reinforce? The challenge for parents of bilingual children is to construct an environment that promotes the status of the minority language while fitting seamlessly with one’s family’s media consumption habits.  If we are only speaking a minority language at home, it is likely that media in that language will be a natural part of that home’s language environment.  It may take extra effort and expense to find minority language DVDs, subscribe to a TV service with programming in that language, and set-up software on the computer in that language and with its script, but all these things are natural to families operating in a single language at home. 

It is when one parent is taking-in media in the majority language that the genie comes out of the bottle.  If one parent speaks English to a child living in the U.S., it won’t take the child long to realize they have access to English-language shows on TV, songs on the radio, and books in the local library.  Once in school, the appeal of majority language media will grow as kids seek to establish commonalities and have shared experiences with their peers. 

At first it wasn’t challenging for my husband and I to hold the line on our TV viewing policy as the three of us don’t typically watch TV together.  My husband and I watch English-language TV after our daughter is in bed.  My husband sometimes watches Russian-language TV while our daughter is awake.  Until a friend gave our daughter a “Madeline” video in English for her birthday, we exclusively watched Russian-language TV with her.  This compartmentalization allows us to use the TV to increase the appeal of speaking Russian.  In the “Madeline” video and Winnie-the-Pooh movie situations, we experience the challenge of feeling the English language culture push back against our policy.  Allowing our daughter to watch her “Madeline” video was our first major compromise.

Music is a different animal for my family.  Our daughter is much more likely to listen to James Brown (“my music”) or Raffi (“her music”) than to Russian music of either the adult or child variety because we don’t expose her to it.   Most of our family music consumption occurs in the car, and my daughter usually rides with me.  When she does ride with her papa, she’s most likely to hear French pop music, as that is what he’s into these days.  While there is no TV in our daughter’s childcare, she is exposed to English-language music there, too. 

Music is a powerful teacher, as was recently demonstrated to me when she said, “play that song that goes ‘get up-ah, get on up’” (the next line of this, her favorite James Brown song, goes “get on the scene, like a sex machine” – I’m waiting for her to tell Grandma this).  As yet, I have not brought myself to play Russian music.  I find it irritating to listen to and, like the American that I am, I bask in the control I exert in the private world of my car.  Compromise number two:  I have chosen to selfishly enjoy American music in the car rather than make the effort to find and play Russian-language children’s CDs. 

My husband and I work to harness the power of various media to enhance our daughter’s enthusiasm for Russian, while balancing this ambition with our needs for relaxation and entertainment.  Sometimes it seems that the fate of every parent is to feel guilty and anxious about virtually everything.  Bilingual parents simply have one more issue to feel guilty about.  In my mind, I am keeping tally, like a judge scoring a sporting event.  The formula goes something like this:  the number of activities conducted in each language multiplied by the exposure level and child-appeal of that activity. I do the math and feel what we’re doing is simultaneously way over-the-top and never enough.  But, each morning, in the words of the immortal James Brown, we “get up-ah, get on up” and we try our best again.

Colleen Laing is a freelance writer living in Seattle. She has a 3-year-old bilingual daughter. Colleen writes a monthly column for the BBFN newsletter about single-language parenting a bilingual child. She welcomes feedback and article ideas at cblaing@oz.net .

© Colleen Laing

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