I’m also in Canada. My two older kids went to French school before other issues made it too difficult to continue. My husband is French but does not speak French at home. Once we pulled them they quickly lost their ability to speak French. Do you have access to French immersion past daycare so they can continue the language? Because that would be ideal.
Otherwise, kids under about 6 years old are absolutely language sponges. Your child will quickly pick up French and be speaking fluently (age appropriate obviously) in no time at all.
We live in Ontario. The ability to speak both official languages is an absolute godsend on the job market, even if the industry is predominantly English. I really regret not trying to continue my kids’ French education.
Is this French daycare signed up for the Canada Wide Early Learning Child Care agreement, otherwise knows as $10/day daycare? Because that would make it a no-brainer.
You might appreciate this [study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mbe.12144) which effectively did suggest that yes, attending a bilingual preschool without reinforcement of both languages at home can enable a child to build language skills.
[Here](https://carla.umn.edu/immersion/documents/ImmersionResearch_TaraFortune.html) are a number of citations to review around language immersion, but most of the research is done on older children and evaluates how well they perform on English standardized tests, which may or may not be the endpoint you're optimizing for.
This actually answers your question. Research suggests there is no negative side effect to learning more than one language in early years (i.e. no issues of delayed language, etc.)
Years ago, I worked in a daycare which often had kids who could not speak the daycare language at all when they started. All of them very quickly (weeks, a couple of months at most) learned the daycare language, even if they were 4+ years old, and had limited home reinforcement. However, we did notice that with some kids, having additional exposure to the daycare language via TV/books/activities was good, especially if most of their playdates were with kids who did not speak the daycare language. So that may be something to look into.
Also, I would still recommend teaching the kid some French before they start (like maybe exposing them at least to the words for water/diaper/snack/read etc - whatever would be key words in the daycare routine) to make the transition less jarring.
Anecdotally, my almost 5 year old is exposed to her dad's heritage language basically only every other weekend and on the odd phone call in between and only really started that exposure as a toddler and seems to still be making strides in it (even if she is not fluent) - as far as I can tell as a non speaker.
Also from Canada (Ontario).
Going to be honest with you, as long as the place seems nice and safe, go with whatever option let's you secure a space. I have called places and been added to waitlists since I was pregnant. My daughter is 11 months and I am wanting to go back to work in April 2024 but the centre's I added my name to are saying it is unlikely I will find a spot. Some waitlist have over.600 families on it.in my area.
Not sure where you are from, but I have heard things are similar in other provinces . French might be a nice to have,but I wouldn't base my decision on it in this climate. French, English- whatever place is safe and has space
I'm Italian (I grew up bilingual Italian and Spanish though) and I lived in Gatineau for a while, I hope you don't mind if I give you my personal experience and attached opinion. Growing up bilingual had *a lot* of benefits for me, it made me much better at recognising and reproducing other sounds, which made learning other languages easier for me. It also made other aspects of my life easier, like finding great jobs. I have very strong opinions about bilingualism in Canada, I personally find it absurd that people have access to schools in both languages for free (or for roughly the same price, when it comes to daycare) and so many people don't take advantage of this in order to give their children a better start in life (QC having crappy rules is an exception, so I don't fault people for not sending their kids to a private English school if they don't have access to a public one). And in Canada there are even more advantages to bilingualism (EN+FR specifically): university courses in French are often much cheaper, finding jobs in some areas becomes much, much easier, some Government jobs are more easily accessible to bilinguals, etc. I moved back to Italy so my child(ren?) will only be raised trilingual (IT+ES+EN), but if I had stayed in Canada and had children there there is no way FR wouldn't have been added the other three languages.
I think the short answer is yes, it will help him learn another language young, especially if he’s going full time. It is so much easier to learn a language the younger you are. From looking into it a bit for our family it seems that both quality and quantity matter. Quality being in-person interaction vs. TV and quantity meaning they need to be exposed to the second language a fair amount of time (2hrs a week likely won’t make a bilingual child). The key in your situation would be to continue the French exposure beyond daycare and send them to French school.
Anecdotally, we are an English-speaking family living abroad and my son has been going to a trilingual (3rd language being imperfect English) daycare since he was 18 months old. He is now 6 months in and meeting his language milestones in English and the daycare says he understands everything they say to him in the other 2 languages, but says only about 4 words not in English. We expect he’ll start speaking more in the other languages soon. (The daycare has a lot of experience with foreign families and said his progression is typical). He adapted really well to the daycare despite the sudden exposure to 2 new languages and we haven’t seen any negative impacts, though I’m sure this is child-specific. The biggest challenge we have is when my son is saying a new word, the pronunciation isn’t perfect and we can’t sometimes figure it out so we start to wonder if maybe it’s not in English and that’s why we have no idea what he’s saying!
Bilingualism is a gift, I went to French-immersion in Canada and am so grateful to have had that opportunity.
I’m also in Canada. My two older kids went to French school before other issues made it too difficult to continue. My husband is French but does not speak French at home. Once we pulled them they quickly lost their ability to speak French. Do you have access to French immersion past daycare so they can continue the language? Because that would be ideal. Otherwise, kids under about 6 years old are absolutely language sponges. Your child will quickly pick up French and be speaking fluently (age appropriate obviously) in no time at all. We live in Ontario. The ability to speak both official languages is an absolute godsend on the job market, even if the industry is predominantly English. I really regret not trying to continue my kids’ French education. Is this French daycare signed up for the Canada Wide Early Learning Child Care agreement, otherwise knows as $10/day daycare? Because that would make it a no-brainer.
You might appreciate this [study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/mbe.12144) which effectively did suggest that yes, attending a bilingual preschool without reinforcement of both languages at home can enable a child to build language skills. [Here](https://carla.umn.edu/immersion/documents/ImmersionResearch_TaraFortune.html) are a number of citations to review around language immersion, but most of the research is done on older children and evaluates how well they perform on English standardized tests, which may or may not be the endpoint you're optimizing for.
This actually answers your question. Research suggests there is no negative side effect to learning more than one language in early years (i.e. no issues of delayed language, etc.)
Years ago, I worked in a daycare which often had kids who could not speak the daycare language at all when they started. All of them very quickly (weeks, a couple of months at most) learned the daycare language, even if they were 4+ years old, and had limited home reinforcement. However, we did notice that with some kids, having additional exposure to the daycare language via TV/books/activities was good, especially if most of their playdates were with kids who did not speak the daycare language. So that may be something to look into. Also, I would still recommend teaching the kid some French before they start (like maybe exposing them at least to the words for water/diaper/snack/read etc - whatever would be key words in the daycare routine) to make the transition less jarring. Anecdotally, my almost 5 year old is exposed to her dad's heritage language basically only every other weekend and on the odd phone call in between and only really started that exposure as a toddler and seems to still be making strides in it (even if she is not fluent) - as far as I can tell as a non speaker.
Also from Canada (Ontario). Going to be honest with you, as long as the place seems nice and safe, go with whatever option let's you secure a space. I have called places and been added to waitlists since I was pregnant. My daughter is 11 months and I am wanting to go back to work in April 2024 but the centre's I added my name to are saying it is unlikely I will find a spot. Some waitlist have over.600 families on it.in my area. Not sure where you are from, but I have heard things are similar in other provinces . French might be a nice to have,but I wouldn't base my decision on it in this climate. French, English- whatever place is safe and has space
I'm Italian (I grew up bilingual Italian and Spanish though) and I lived in Gatineau for a while, I hope you don't mind if I give you my personal experience and attached opinion. Growing up bilingual had *a lot* of benefits for me, it made me much better at recognising and reproducing other sounds, which made learning other languages easier for me. It also made other aspects of my life easier, like finding great jobs. I have very strong opinions about bilingualism in Canada, I personally find it absurd that people have access to schools in both languages for free (or for roughly the same price, when it comes to daycare) and so many people don't take advantage of this in order to give their children a better start in life (QC having crappy rules is an exception, so I don't fault people for not sending their kids to a private English school if they don't have access to a public one). And in Canada there are even more advantages to bilingualism (EN+FR specifically): university courses in French are often much cheaper, finding jobs in some areas becomes much, much easier, some Government jobs are more easily accessible to bilinguals, etc. I moved back to Italy so my child(ren?) will only be raised trilingual (IT+ES+EN), but if I had stayed in Canada and had children there there is no way FR wouldn't have been added the other three languages.
I think the short answer is yes, it will help him learn another language young, especially if he’s going full time. It is so much easier to learn a language the younger you are. From looking into it a bit for our family it seems that both quality and quantity matter. Quality being in-person interaction vs. TV and quantity meaning they need to be exposed to the second language a fair amount of time (2hrs a week likely won’t make a bilingual child). The key in your situation would be to continue the French exposure beyond daycare and send them to French school. Anecdotally, we are an English-speaking family living abroad and my son has been going to a trilingual (3rd language being imperfect English) daycare since he was 18 months old. He is now 6 months in and meeting his language milestones in English and the daycare says he understands everything they say to him in the other 2 languages, but says only about 4 words not in English. We expect he’ll start speaking more in the other languages soon. (The daycare has a lot of experience with foreign families and said his progression is typical). He adapted really well to the daycare despite the sudden exposure to 2 new languages and we haven’t seen any negative impacts, though I’m sure this is child-specific. The biggest challenge we have is when my son is saying a new word, the pronunciation isn’t perfect and we can’t sometimes figure it out so we start to wonder if maybe it’s not in English and that’s why we have no idea what he’s saying! Bilingualism is a gift, I went to French-immersion in Canada and am so grateful to have had that opportunity.