Do You Want Children Who Are Smarter and Have Superior Social Skills? Science Says Do This

If you're a parent, you instinctively want what's best for your children. So, what's one way to give your children a leg up--a single skill that single-handedly increases their chances at success? 

Science says: Encourage them to learn another language. Increased Intelligence In recent years, scientists and researchers have made breakthroughs in their understanding of bilingualism. 

In the past, experts thought that learning a second language was an "interference" that hindered children's academic and intellectual development. But in a New York Times article entitled "Why Bilinguals Are Smarter", Yudhijit Bhattacharjee explains why this interference is actually a good thing.

Recent research from Kinzler's developmental psychology lab indicates that "multilingual exposure improves not only children's cognitive skills but also their social abilities."
For example, one study illustrates how multilingual children demonstrate better general communication skills than monolingual children:

A group of children in the United States, ages 4 to 6,were taken  from different linguistic backgrounds, and presented them with a situation in which they had to consider someone else's perspective to understand her meaning. For example, an adult said to the child: "Ooh, a small car! Can you move the small car for me?" Children could see three cars--small, medium and large--but were in position to observe that the adult could not see the smallest car. Since the adult could see only the medium and large cars, when she said "small" car, she must be referring to the child's "medium." 

It was DISCOVERED  that bilingual children were better than monolingual children at this task. If you think about it, this makes intuitive sense. Interpreting someone's utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.

In essence, children who speak other languages are more in tune with others.


What about children who speak only one language, but are regularly exposed to another?
Kinzler's lab found that "children who were effectively monolingual yet regularly exposed to another language--for example, those who had grandparents who spoke another language--were just as talented as the bilingual children at this task." (Italics mine.) However, Kinsey reports that the "exposure" children didn't perform better than other monolinguals on cognitive tasks.

In other words, simply putting your children in touch with another language (even if they don't learn to speak it fluently) may not necessarily increase their IQ, but it can give them superior communication skills and contribute to a broader perspective.

Source;INC Magazine