How French do you want to be?
September 8th, 2006 | 
Author: I read an article in the Conexion today about integrating yourself into French society and one piece of advice was to speak French to the kids and ban English TV which set me thinking.
The family giving that advice was effectively robbing their kids of any chance of being bilingual which is a major advantage that you can give your children by living here. Moreover, isn’t that trying to be “more French than the French”? After all, a growing number of the French are finding that speaking English is an advantage in todays world. OK, France as a country may not like that situation, but that’s the reality.
Friends of ours are finding that by only having French TV and having their children going to French school that it is already becoming harder for them to communicate with their 10 year old (they’ve been here about 5 years). She’s not as fluent in English as she is in French and that situation can only get worse (or do you think “better”?) as she gets older. I’m sure that it’s not only her English language that she’s losing but her British culture too.
What about her parents? They only watch French TV so are gradually becoming more detached from the reality of life in the UK. Is that a good thing? I’m sure that they’ll not lose their ability to speak English fluently but if they stay here another 20 years, I suspect that going back to the UK would be like moving to a foreign country. Just look back to 1986 to see what I mean. How much has the UK changed since Thatcher? You don’t fully understand French taxation now I’m sure, but with a 20 year gap, would you understand UK taxation? I think not. Scotland didn’t have it’s own government then but it could even be a separate country in 20 years time: how much would that change UK culture? Even if you’d left as little as ten years ago, chances are you’d not know the English terms for e-mail and the like and be quoting your Minitel address to people. But you get the idea – the longer that they are out of touch with UK life, the more it will seem like a foreign country.
As for your kids: remember that they’ll have spent a much larger proportion of their lives “abroad”, so will they still consider the UK as “home”? What will you do if/when you decide to move back to the UK and they don’t want to move to a “foreign country”? Because, if you’re talking 10 or more years, it would be a foreign country to them.
So how French do you want to be? How French do you want your children to be? How French do you want your grandchildren to be?
They’re not easy questions to answer, but you should think about them.
Arnold
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
Posted in 
I remember chatting to a family of four where I think mum was from the UK and dad was from France, they tried to stick to speaking English in the house and French outside.
And another couple I knew hadn’t been back to the UK in the best part of ten years since moving over, and I think they were quite happy with that.
Much is going to come down to the individuals themselves and where they consider ‘home’ is I suppose. Problems arise when this decision can’t be made.
I think that for most people, a balance is the best thing to aim for. The problem is that if you don’t think about the issue, it may turn out quite differently to what you’d expect.
For example, in a bilingual family with one French, the other English, then the kids can easily grow up truly bilingual if each parent sticks to speaking their own language to the children and the children go to a bilingual school ie everything balanced. If one element is out of balance (more than likely either the school and/or TV) then the child will have their language skewed to one of the languages.
It’s also quite different if it’s a couple without kids. There, if they’re happy enough to live out their days in France (and many are), that’s fine. But if they think at some point that they may want to return to the UK, I suspect that it’s best to keep in touch with events in the UK to avoid it feeling like moving abroad when the day comes that they do move.
As Craig says, it depends on where you think “home” is. Do bear in mind though that “home” for you might not be the same place as “home” is for your kids.