At least one parent to whom these word are addressed will be bilingual, or near bilingual, as a result of having studied, traveled, been posted, or served a mission abroad. Your kids probably won't repeat the experience you had in acquiring a second language. But it would be an advantage for them, job-wise, mission-wise, and mostly culture-wise, to be functional in a foreign tongue.
Once one has acquired the ability to think in another idiom, it's easier by a quantum leap to acquire a third (or fourth). In my own family, growing up, my dad would always introduce a "table topic" during our evening meal (about the only one we had together as family) -- Toastmasters has adopted the table topic idea as part of its program to encourage development of public speaking skills among its membership. A number of overseas Toastmasters Clubs promote bilingual table topic discussions to provide friendly criticism by native speakers of member's facility in an acquired language needed for business or social purposes. A brother-in-law wisely adopted the policy, while his children were still young, of saying prayers at table in Norwegian. It was at least a start, and two of his sons served their missions in Scandinavia -- one in Norway, the other in closely language-related Sweden.
Parents with command of a foreign language might think of combining these two approaches: prayers plus an evening-meal foreign language "table topic". Your kids will pick up at least the rudiments of the language by osmosis. Rich people used to hire a foreign nanny for the kids just so they'd absorb French (or English, or German) as children, without accent and without the trauma of having to start in school at age twelve or so without prior exposure, background or preparation.
John McCrone has just published a book called The Ape That Spoke which gives the best explanation of how the mind works I've ever come across. Author asserts that the human brain, unlike that of our animal cousins, continues to grow in size and linkages by a third after birth and that, again, unlike other animals, the myelin sheaths that insulate our brain cells, are not put in place until we are five or six years old. In other words, we are not "hard wired" as are other animals within a few weeks or months of birth. We thus continue to form multiple, inter-connected new synapses forming the bases for identifying future interrelation-ships of objects, events, and processes, enabling humans to imagine the future (which, at present, it is believed animals can't do), review the past, and devise new processes and ways of doing things.
The richer one's network of interrelationships, the more "creative" one will be as an adult. And, since creativeness is a prime
ingredient of intelligence, the more experience a child has during
these early formative years, the more intelligent, ceteris paribus ,
he'll be as an adult. Naturally, our genetic inheritance also importantly affects how many synapses our brains develop. Indeed, recent studies show that almost seventy per cent of one's intelligence is inherited. And this seventy per cent would quite
clearly refer to the elaborateness of the inherited synaptic wiring pattern But environmental enrichment plays an important role affecting the other third. McCrone suggests that the "memory tracks" laid down in our minds during the first six or eight years are the deepest of all, providing the "associations" on which all future experiences, recollections, and experimentation are based. This is why contemporary psychology suggests that crib toys, lullabys, and bedtime stories give kids reared by thoughtful, dedicated parents a headstart over more carelessly reared ghetto kids. Some are even going so far as to acknowledge that the old folk superstition that exposing a fetus in the womb to classical music may have some basis in fact.
Returning to the point we're making regarding language, the McCone theory explains why it is so much more difficult to acquire an alternative idiom's logic system as we get older. The myelin sheaths are in place and we're already "hardwired" for a single vocabulary/grammar logic system. Of course, the remaining mental flexibility which makes us human, also makes it possible, with great effort, to forge the new synaptic connections which enable us to speak a new language. I remember being told by a highly qualified and experienced State Department linguist years ago that when kids have acquired a second (or third) language early, even if they then don't use it for years, that if they ever return to it, it is reacquired much more rapidly (and painlessly), and with much less foreign accent because they already have the underlying "wiring" to make these associations. McCrone provides a reasoned basis for this argument.
Alfred Holfert left Germany as a sixteen year old and acquired grammatical English; but he always kept a fairly strong German accent (ditto Henry Kissinger). Alfred spoke little German for almost forty years. But when he went back to Germany ten years ago for his first visit since leaving, he reports that the language came back within a couple of weeks. It always takes me two or three days to dredge up my French after speaking Spanish for a few years, and vice versa with Spanish after speaking French. I've always envied my foreign friends who have two or three tongues at their finger tips and can switch from one to the other without pause as a result of having been raised by foreign language nannies. If you start exposing your kids now (ideally reinforced with some foreign language video cartoons which are now available), they can learn their French (or Spanish, or Russian, or Chinese) virtually without effort or pain. I'd start with the foreign language you know because you can introduce it at table without further preparation, and simply by persevering get your kids used to the idea that things can be said equally well with a different system of sounds and subject/verb placement.
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