Why do young parents get so defensive about this?

Hi guys, I'm currently working on a much longer piece to tell you about my new job but here's a quick rant to get something off my chest entitled, "this is why I don't leave comments on Facebook". Normally, I don't like to interact with people on Facebook because I often end up disagreeing with someone I don't even know and it all blows up into a massive argument because someone took what I had written as a personal insult. So recently, I chanced upon a status update by a friend and I couldn't resist: I have changed all the details to protect the identity of the young child involved as we're talking about a two year old girl here. I have a friend in Belgium whom we shall call Frank, he has a Dutch wife with Eastern European roots. Frank is originally from Malaysia and they have a daughter whom we shall call Lisa. Given that both Frank and his wife are multilingual, there is the opportunity to teach Lisa up to six or seven languages but Frank was worried that young Lisa might get confused if they overloaded her young mind with vocabulary from so many languages; what if she was trying to write a sentence in French or Dutch whilst at school but comes up with a word from another language like English or Polish instead? After all, Lisa is only two years old at the moment so it's not as if that has happened yet, but being a concerned parent, Frank just wants to know if he is doing the right thing by exposing his daughter to this many languages at that age. This seems like quite a normal conversation until I waded in and offended a lot of the parents there. I'll share with you my opinion here because I'm sure my regular readers know me well - I'm not saying anything all that controversial, but I'll let you be the judge as I was genuinely quite surprised by the reaction I got. 

Now my opinion is that Frank should continue exposing Lisa to a large number of languages and she may become stunningly multilingual, she may not but at least it is always good to stimulate a young mind in a variety of ways: be it through music, sports, dance, food, meeting new people or in this case, learning words from another language. However, the key factor as to whether or not Lisa will grow up to be excellent at languages or crap at them depends on whether she has a talent for language - let's not pretend that learning a new language is easy. I am currently trying very hard to make my Spanish fluent enough for my new job and I'm grappling with so many aspects of Spanish: I really need to improve  my listening comprehension, I need to expand my vocabulary, I need a better grasp of the grammar and whilst I enjoy the process, oh it is really difficult. I already speak Spanish and it is my fourth language, imagine if I had to make a language like German (currently my eighth language) as good as my second language French - that would be a much bigger challenge than the one I have on my plate now. Many people have indeed tried and failed - either they give up, or they do just enough to pass an exam for the language at school and then promptly forget everything they have ever learnt. So I really thought I was simply stating the obvious when I pointed out that Lisa would pick up those languages if she was really intelligent, had a high IQ and had a talent for languages but if she was stupid, then it wouldn't matter what you did, then you couldn't cure her stupidity as a parent by trying to bring her up in a completely different manner - you get the child you're given. I speak for myself as a child whose parents probably got most things wrong, but as I am really quite intelligent, hence I taught myself a lot of things anyway and I was not dependent on my parents teaching me much.

Oh the reaction, I offended so many people and they were all so angry at me. It was not like they had a good argument to point out to me that I was wrong, it was all like, "every child is unique and different, you can't reduce a child down to their IQ - they could have other talents and gifts that do not show up in a regular IQ test or the exam results." Then there were the parents who claimed that there was a lot of science behind how young children like Lisa react to different kinds of stimuli and that many studies have shown the importance of raising children the right way in order to help give them the best start in life as their young brains are developing. And so I said, "yeah so you have a dumb kid who is failing to respond to anything the teachers are doing at school, but once you switch to organic vegetables and San Pellegrino mineral water suddenly, you've turned on a switch in the kid's brain and they go from zero to hero. As if you can cure stupidity and increase a child's IQ by doing little things like that." I say this as I was woefully neglected as a child, if not for the fact that I had two older sisters who looked out for me, if it was left to my parents, I would have probably died of neglect before the age of five given how my parents really weren't interested in me at all. Oh that angered even more parents, I was attacked and told that "IQ is a bourgeoisie construct designed to discriminate against certain groups of people and it was wrong to differentiate people into stupid and clever. A bus driver is contributes to society as much as a hedge fund manager and we shouldn't use arbitrary benchmarks like IQ or paper qualifications to judge people." I rolled my eyes, how did we even get here? Oh yeah - it was my suggestion that young Lisa needed to be intelligent before she could do anything she wanted, or else she can forget it. Let's just say that I don't think Lisa is going to get into a top university if she was downright stupid. Pardon me for stating the obvious but it does help to be naturally intelligent in life. 

Then of course, I encountered the rebuttal was, "you are not a parent, you'll never understand." Yeah - too darn right, I am not a parent so I will never understand what it is like to have a really stupid child but to go so deep into denial and tell yourself crap like, "my son is just a late developer, he is just a bit playful, he needs to learn focus and then he will reach his full potential." Look, I wasn't even suggesting anything about Lisa - at the age of two, it is way too early for anyone to try to pass any judgment on whether or not she will become a clever child or not. But it's just the suggestion that she could be clever or stupid which made quite a few of the young parents very upset on that Facebook discussion. Why is this so? Take my suggestion that whether or not Lisa would become stunningly multilingual would depend on whether she was intelligent or not - one parents claimed that in some societies in South Africa, people there spoke several languages as being so multilingual was just a way of life in that part of the world and it wasn't associated with being super intelligent or having a very high IQ. That's untrue as it does take a lot of effort to master a new language to a high standard - now in the case of these people in South Africa, they have an incentive to speak a new language: it's called making money. If a Xhosa speaker wants to sell his goods to the nearby Zulu community, then he has an incentive to want to learn Zulu. Just look at the way the Chinese and Malay communities in Singapore have been exposed to each other's languages for decades, but they make little or no effort to bother learning each other's language: simply being exposed to a language doesn't mean you'll pick it up. You need a good incentive to want to learn a language! You can't catch it the way you get Covid - never underestimate just how difficult it can be to become fluent in a foreign language. 

Perhaps these people (these are Frank's friends whom I don't know) weren't worried about their children being subjected to my harsh judgment, maybe they were worried about me judging them. Maybe they are thinking, hey I don't speak seven languages, I barely speak two but I refuse to let Alex tell me that it is because I am stupid! Thus it could be that these young parents themselves don't want to be judged - after all, what Frank is doing is pretty amazing: how many parents can bring up their children in such a multilingual environment? What Lisa is experiencing is nothing short of amazing of course, but the parents out there who are bringing up their children with only one or two languages must be thinking, wait a minute I am not doing this - does this make me a bad parent? That's when I roll my eyes and reassure them that if they do have a child who will develop a passion for a particular foreign language, they will pursue it when they are older. My friend Alfred from gymnastics who is totally fluent in Spanish - he had spent his gap year working in Spain and then he has spent most of this summer back in Spain in a Spanish speaking work environment. He did all this with no help from his parents, who are as Scottish as they come and are totally monolingual. He happens to also speak French and German to a very high standard as well!  Now I wouldn't say that my friend's parents were terrible parents in not having raised him speaking all those foreign languages in that they raised a young man who was impressively intelligent and resourceful enough to pursue anything he was passionate about with very little or no help from his parents. Contrast that to the young adults who are completely dependent on their parents for everything and whose parents have to give them so much support into adulthood; but we're still left with a tricky question - do we give Alfred's parents some credit for the way they have brought up Alfred or is all that credit really for Alfred to claim for himself then?

At the end of the day, I think these young parents are defensive because they want to be good parents but they are terrified at the idea that there are things that are simply beyond their control. Now that's me being kind and giving them the benefit of the doubt; if I wanted to be a bitch, I'd say they're totally out of touch with reality, refusing to accept the limits of their power of influence over their children. But on the other hand, very smart people like Alfred can go on to achieve anything they want but would that be a uphill struggle against the odds (as in my case) or would his parents be there every step of the way to support and help him? I go back to this saying from the world of poker: it is possible to win with a bad hand but it's hard to lose when you're dealt a really good hand. So what do you think? Have you met young parents who are woefully unrealistic or incredibly defensive about their parenting skills? Do you think anyone can learn six or seven languages to a high standard or is that really only reserved for really intelligent people? What are the factor that will determine if Lisa will become multilingual? Please feel free to leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.