The Older children in your family should be expected to help the younger children become bilinguals. They should encourage their younger siblings to speak the secondary language at home rather than the surrounding language. They should also speak the family language in other public locations or among friends.

This should be the policy not only in the parents' presence, but also when the parents are not around, when the children are playing among themselves, when they're in their bedrooms, and when they talk to each other on the telephone. There should never be a situation in which the children would speak the surrounding language, unless they are in the company of others who speak the surrounding language exclusively.

In this way bilingualism becomes a family project. The older ones help the younger ones learn the importance of speaking the family language.

This has many advantages because the younger children accept bilingualism as a tradition rather than a punishment, and they learn to take pride in the family language.

The older siblings feel important because they are in charge of bilingualism. They feel that they are helping out the younger ones. They feel that they have a job to do not by forcing, but by a friendly, polite, nice way of dealing with brothers and sisters.

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