A couple of days ago I got up from an afternoon nap to hear Lydia call out, “Hej mamma” almost as soon as I had opened my bedroom door. As I returned her greeting she came quickly into the kitchen to tell me, “Mikaela är här.”

“Okay,” I said and carried on getting myself something to drink. She came further into the room, gave my outfit the once-over, and whispered with relief, “Vad tur att du inte är i trosor.”*

While that’s a good enough story to stand on its own, what it really made me think about is that she hasn’t yet realized that I use her choice of language as a cue to tell me whether or not she has friends over, and that her greeting in Swedish had already told me that Mikaela was here. I don’t know if it’s something she’ll eventually outgrow, but since she started school almost three years ago, she refuses to speak English within earshot of her friends. Not only that, but she would really rather that I didn’t speak English in front of them either (and for the most part I oblige her, because I really have nothing to gain by pressing the matter).

The subject of bilingual children is one that comes up fairly frequently among ex-pats — at least among those who have or are planning to have children. There are a few different methods of running a bi- or multi-lingual household, with the most common being OPOL (One Parent/One Language) and ml@h (minority language at home). Most of the families I know use the OPOL method and it certainly seems to be the most popular method according to the resources I’ve seen.

As for us, we use ml@h, which means that English is our home language. Olof and I speak English with each other and with the kids, and they in turn speak English with us. Our own little variation is that we all speak Swedish when we’re in Swedish-speaking company, regardless of whether we’re in our home, their home, or out in public. Otherwise it’s (almost) all English, (almost) all the time for our family.

The primary reason we chose to use this approach is that we want our children to speak English as a native language, not to learn it in school. While that end is certainly possible with OPOL, I have known a great many parents using that method whose children refuse to speak the minority language. That is, while the kids understand English just fine, they won’t speak it and often grow up never feeling completely comfortable speaking it. Speaking English at home is our way to try to avoid that outcome.

So far it seems to be working. Lydia was 4½ when we moved to Sweden and, of course, already spoke good English. After a couple of years here, Swedish had become her dominant language, but she still has a good command of English and speaks it with ease at home and with our English-speaking friends. Last night, in fact, I suggested that she, Olof, and I speak Swedish while we were playing Monopoly Junior, and she said that it felt embarrassing and awkward for us to do that and insisted on speaking English.

For the moment, Tage’s dominant language is English, which makes sense as he spends much more time in the company of our immediate family than he does in Swedish company. That said, however, he seems to have a fairly good understanding of Swedish, and when he is addressed in Swedish he will nearly always respond in kind. His Swedish vocabulary is much narrower than his English vocabulary, but at his age (2½), that hardly bears worrying about. A big part of the ml@h approach is the assumption that the child will pick up the majority language simply by virtue of living in the majority-language society. That held true with Lydia, who never had any formal Swedish training, and it seems so far to be holding true with Tage.

If only it had been so easy for me.

*Good thing you’re not in your underwear.