L2 parenting myth: Fear of unnaturalness

Something that has developed out of a recent L2 excercise offers great counter-evidence to one of the main myths of L2 parenting: that it "feels unnatural."*  

With the particular idioms I've been focusing on with my son, which have to do with confiding and maintaining confidence, my conversational raw material has been to recount "secrets": mostly awkward, embarrassing, and emotionally painful episodes from my childhood and youth. I ask my son if I can confide a secret to him, he says yes, I recount the secret, we talk about it, then ask him if I can depend on him to not tell anybody, and he says yes. 

We've done this a dozen times or so over the last couple of weeks. In order to get the reps in, I've been searching my memory and have remembered things that I haven't thought about in many years and probably would not have, absent the L2 excercise. 

I actually didn't intend it this way. That is, I didn't choose the idiom in order to have these particular conversations, but for linguistic reasons having to do with their grammatical and syntactical complexity. Only in retrospect did I come up with conversational material to fit the idioms. 

The result has been some great conversations about things we might not have ever even talked about otherwise. Since the secrets all concern my childhood, I tell them in such a way as to maximize their relatability to J. He pays very close attention, asks me questions, and thinks out loud about his own situations. 

In my puppetry essay, I describe why my own initial fear of unnaturalness turned out to be unfounded: "If anything, the L2, in prompting me to interact with my son with more verbal intensity than otherwise and to use quantitatively more language with him in different ways, has brought me emotionally closer to him." 

This idiom excercise is a great example. If we had never embarked on the L2 adventure, maybe I would have told him some of my "secrets" anyway, in the course of time. But almost certainly not as many, and not in such depth, and maybe not in a way that would have fostered as much confidence between us.

*On this and numerous other myths, see Christine Jernigan, Family Language Learning. Learn Another Language, Raise Bilingual Children (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2015), p. 16-17.