Keeping the home-country language alive at home — worth the effort?

We keep a strict home-language-only rule at the dinner table. Imperfectly followed most nights, but it’s clearly better than nothing over time.

No kids myself but this is such a real tension, following with genuine interest.

My older kids resented the push at the time and thanked me for it as adults. It’s a long game, not something that pays off quickly.

At home we speak only Ukrainian, and Sofiia goes to a Ukrainian Saturday school with other children from here. She complains about the Saturday school sometimes, but it's also where her friends are, so it doesn't feel like homework to her. For us the language is not only about grandparents. It is about her knowing where she comes from.

Romanian at home, English everywhere else. The bedtime story is always in Romanian and that's the one rule I've never broken.

Our eight-year-old now answers in English, even when we ask in Urdu. We've started video calls with grandparents twice a week, and they only speak Urdu, so he has to.

Elena, the bedtime story rule is lovely. We might steal that one.

Speaking Arabic at home was the easy part for us. Reading and writing was the hard part, because school fills their day and nobody teaches Arabic script here. We found an online tutor for two short lessons a week, and our daughter now writes to her grandmother in Arabic, badly, but she writes. That was worth more to my mother than any gift we could send.

We're lucky that Portuguese is the local language here, so this is one worry I don't have. Reading this thread, I realise how lucky.

From the grandparent side: our grandchildren's Danish is fading, and it hurts more than I expected. Keep going, all of you.