For the last five months, on the four days per week that I take J to school, we've had a routine where we sit down together in the library for a few minutes (2-5) and have a chat (always in German of course).
(Thanks to librarian Tanya H. for the photos)
This has become an important part of our L2 routine after the pre-k days when we had one whole day together per week. It is also a lovely bit of quality father-son time. It's one of those many ways in which our L2 relationship, which I, like many people, had initially feared would feel unnatural, has in fact encouraged behaviors and interactions that contribute to the quality of the relationship with my son. If I had never undertaken to speak German with him, would it have occurred to me to set aside a few minutes every day to just chat with him? Maybe. But maybe not!
Initially I would read something like jokes or riddles. In the last couple of months I've stopped doing that and we've just been talking about whatever comes up. Recently it's been World of Warcraft. All I have to do is ask J about his characters and quests and he'll just narrate away.
Another thing I've started doing recently is to have him ask me questions. His task is to think up one good question every morning, about something he doesn't know about me or his mother. The goal here is to encourage him to take an active interest in other people's lives and perspectives, become a good listener and interlocutor. He has good social skills already (L2 may play a role in this), this is just building on that.
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.
