A linguist who started speaking French to her daughter when she was a baby says the experiment became a six-year language project with a surprising result: the child now corrects the parent.
She began using French at home during the COVID-19 restrictions, after dusting off a language she had last used in high school. Today, her daughter is 6 years old and speaks French just as fluently as English, thanks in part to bilingual schools in their neighborhood and daily exposure at home.
The mother says her own French improved little by little alongside her daughter’s. She still has an American accent and makes mistakes, but the child does not copy them. Instead, she catches them. One example she shares: 'Le vidéo doesn't make any sense, maman,' her daughter told her in French.
That experience pushed back on criticism she received online. Some commenters argued that a parent who is not perfectly fluent should not speak that language 100% of the time to a child. Others worried that using a non-native language could hurt emotional connection.
She says the evidence she reviewed before starting the project reinforced the opposite view. Children absorb language from the community, especially from peers, but a language heard mostly at home needs more support to stick. In her case, the result has been a child who moves easily between English with her father and French with her mother.
Her husband also dismissed the idea that French was hurting the relationship. If anything, he told her, the two are 'weirdly close.' She describes their bond as a very strong one, and says the shared language journey likely helped build it.
That is the part founders and parents can take to heart: progress often comes from repetition, not polish. Start with what you can sustain, then let the system compound. In this case, the system was one language at home, another in school, and a parent willing to keep going despite small mistakes.
The broader lesson is simple. You do not need perfect execution to create a durable outcome. You need consistency, exposure, and enough patience to let the child do the correcting.
