Bilingual from the Beginning: Giving Your Child the Best Start
My child is my calling to be better
There is no reason for being, no cause more critical, no investment more important, and no legacy more vital than ones children. It doesn’t matter if they’re biological offspring or adopted. A baby doesn’t yet know sadness, loss, grief. Similarly, a baby doesn’t know joy or happiness. A child’s mind and consciousness is a beautifully fresh, new, blank canvas of humanity, not yet aware of how badly we’ve screwed up as a species, of the mistakes we’ve made as a nation, the transgressions, the horrors we’ve caused, and the completely stupid shit we do almost every day while we keep trying to do better.
A child is our last opportunity be better.
Better. Not perfect. Perfect is too much to ask for. It’s unrealistic. But better, that’s possible. And it only takes two things:
You
Your child
Finding my magnetic North
Before my first child came along, my priorities were a spinning compass based on what other people told me was important, or what other people told me were “opportunities”. In business school they romanticized folks like Tim Cook and Elon Musk, men who subjugated their lives to their businesses. They’re building empires with “lasting value” my b-school professors would say. Sure, that influenced me. So did everything around me. Then my son was born, and when I first looked at him in the hospital, and held him in my hands, my internal human compass instantly snapped to magnetic north I didn’t know existed. Now, nothing else mattered more than his welfare. This started the dominoes falling in my life. As I write this, I realize there were so many things that changed. Things I noticed that before couldn’t catch my attention. My son’s arrival marked major career changes. Life changes. Attitude changes.
Of all the decisions I made in the months that followed my child’s birth, there was one decision that has paid forward - maybe more than any other. I realize that even in hindsight I couldn’t have possibly recognized how important the decision was at the time, and that terrifies me the same way contemplating scenarios about what if my grandparents never met messes with my own existentialism. That decision had to do with the school we discovered shortly after my son was born. Let me explain:
Blissful panic
On the first night at home, having returned from the hospital, my wife and I sat side by side on our bed, but this time we weren’t a couple. We were a family. Our little one lay between us, wrapped in a swaddle, quietly cooing with the occasional hiccup interrupting the serenity. My wife and I sat there, in awe at everything that had happened in the past few days (most of which my wife will NEVER let me forget, dammit). It’s clear to me now, today, as I write this, that our internal needles were quietly, with no words, beginning to snap onto the new magnetic North- the new direction and priorities that matter to ensure our son’s safety and well-being.
Then words started happening. We started talking about the future. What would he be like? What would be become? What do we need to start doing now that we’re parents? What do we need to plan for? It was like a sort of crazy responsibility-panic set it. My wife and I used to enjoy lazy Sundays sipping champagne, watching movies or reading a book or whatever we felt like doing. Now, all of that suddenly self-destructed to make way for responsible parenting. As we discussed all of the possible future scenarios of our child’s future life, one consideration stood out for both my wife and I more than anything : How could he learn Japanese and understand what being Japanese means, in addition to being American and understanding what that means?
We decided that night, with our son cooing quietly between us on our bed, that we would find a way to give him access to both worlds, both languages, and both cultures. We had no idea how to do it, but we tend to make up our minds and then figure it out.
An accidental discovery
A few months later my wife discovered a little school via a Google search, Montessori International Academy. This was way before we started visiting what felt like every Montessori on the face of the planet. There are a lot of schools that lay claim to the Montessori image and promise, especially in Irvine. This school was out in some remote part of Costa Mesa, not at all convenient for the Irvine resident accustomed to the most convenient streets and traffic anywhere in the US, let alone the world. I was a little dismayed, but I was also rushed back that- trying to keep up with work while not getting any sleep with an infant and wife who needed me at night. I went with my wife in a sort of zombie-like cruise control state that I’m sure a lot of fathers remember. And I distinctly remember being surprised when I walked in. It was clear they were then leasing from a church or similar with extra space. What I saw was striking, even to a dad who wasn’t yet experienced with children: Every single child was engaged - and I mean focused, interested and intent on the teachers and on the other children. In fact, I noticed that the children were more focused than even my own employees back at my office. There was this sort of positive energy coming from the teachers. They loved what they were doing and you could tell the students loved it to.
And then there was a bigger surprise, one I never expected: A little girl, maybe 3, walked up to one teacher and asked her something in Japanese. The teacher replied in Japanese. Then she asked another question, and the teacher suggested she do something. The little girl walked up to another teacher, but this time addressed her in English, explaining something that surely must be related to the discussion she had with the first teacher. Having gotten the direction or whatever she had wanted, she thanked the second teacher in English, and then walked back the first teacher and thanked her in Japanese.
This blew my mind. Not because I didn’t know it was possible. But because I didn’t know it existed. My grandfather was from a little part of Europe where the kids grew up this way. In fact, in his house in Long Beach, California, I grew up listening to six languages every day. That’s just the way things were. It’s still that way in many parts of Europe. Being monolingual is the exception, the rarity, the minority.
My wife and I went on the waiting list from the day of the first visit. I know! From a few months old. I have my wife to thank for that. She’s proactive. And it’s actually quite common in Japan for moms still pregnant to attend information sessions and try to get their future child on a waiting list. What’s embarrassing however is that we kept turning Montessori International Academy down, at least a few times. We finally ended up enrolling our son in preschool at age 3, but knowing what I know about the school today, I would have enrolled him from age 2 if I could do it all over again.
Three major reasons Montessori International Academy stands out from all other schools
I’m going to fast forward and share with you why it was such a good decision to place our son at Montessori International Academy.
First, the school is focused on letting the absolute best potential of the child manifest. The environment, the teachers, the vision, the philosophy, and every aspect of the operations at Montessori International Academy is aligned to this. You can’t miss it. And it’s a continuous improvement environment. I spent years in Orange County, including Irvine, and also in Kobe, Japan, looking for an environment like this- and I have yet to find it. The Principal, Sumiyo Sensei, has set a tone and provides passionate leadership on a daily basis that keeps everyone energized and focused on what matters: The children. Their safety, their well-being, and their growth and development. Children at Montessori International Academy are thoughtful, expressive, curious, smart, happy, interested, motivated and above all else, kind and compassionate.
Next, the school has managed to merge the most effective implementation of Montessori methodology in teaching along with a unique bilingual language environment. There’s much too theory to go into here, but I can attest to the fact that what Sumiyo Sensei and her team have done is what many in Japan think is impossible: The children learn how to think and communicate in two languages, in parallel. And they learn how to approach problems, opportunities, and even playtime within a Montessori framework that enables them to learn how to think for themselves, enjoy doing so, and grow as they explore the limits of this world they’re in.
That alone would be enough for most parents: A child filled with curiosity, positivity, a learning process and an eagerness to learn, ready to take on the world starting with elementary school. And bilingual, no less. And yet there was more.
Finally, Sumiyo Sensei, during the four years our son attended her school, created a multiple-discipline curriculum that parents could enjoy as little or as much as they prefer, without arduous fees or commitments. My son started with extracurricular physical education, and began to learn karaate. He learned the tea ceremony, as well as etiquette for honoring ones’ seniors. During this same time, my wife and I learned lessons with the help of some of the teachers and the director: We had to learn how to parent more effectively. We also learned how to more effectively work with each other - husband and wife - and how we as parent could work better with the teachers at school to ensure consistency for our son between the school and home environments. Consistency is everything. Check out the blog post I wrote about it here.
The result of all of this was a more confident, calm and happy child, ready for what was to come. Now, we’re not your typical family. We decided to move to Japan where our son would start Japanese public school from first grade. Not private school. Public school. And that decision is worthy of its own blog post. The point is, when we moved to Japan our son not only adapted, but thrived. In hindsight, there were several things that validated the change that was happening in our son before we moved. Where he had difficulty in some areas before, now he was thriving. He taught himself how to ride a bike. He started asking about other sports, confident that he could take on and learn things with my support. He started snorkeling (supervised of course) at age 4 (age 5, pictured above, following a sea turtle around a bay). His confidence and ability to listen, learn and appreciated skyrocketed.
A lasting impression
It’s now been a year since we moved to Japan, starting an entirely new life, in a new neighborhood, with new schools, new friends and an entirely new environment. My son talks about Montessori International Academy still. He talks about the teachers. He talks about the friends he made. And he talks about memories he has of accomplishments that made a lasting impression on his life, like learning how to play Scratch on stage in a live performance of Lion King, performed for all the parents. In fact, every time he accomplishes something new, like the 3 kilometers non-stop, high-paced run from the mountains of Kobe to the ocean (which he did yesterday), the first thing he does is connect it to some priority in life he learned from his teachers. “Papa, can I FaceTime Hiroshi Sensei and tell him what I just did? He’ll be so proud of me.”
Steve Jobs once said that in life, it’s difficult to connect the dots forward, but you can absolutely recognize how they dots connect in hindsight.
Choosing Montessori International Academy for our son’s initial education was one of the best decisions we ever made. While my son may not necessarily realize it as he goes from elementary school to junior high school to high school to college and beyond, the school poured an intellectual and emotional foundation for him to build on in the future. And as I write, this, he’s beginning to show interest in my other mother tongue, French. It hasn’t been an easy process by any means, but the responsibility of parenting is on the parents. To the degree you pick the right school to partner with, the right school with the right teachers, the right vision and the right environment can help make parenting a joy, a pleasure and even, as in our case, a very successful endeavor.
I hope you enjoyed this post. It’s not sponsored in any way. For full disclosure, today I serve in an advisory role to the Principal and her team.
What I have learned from our experience and the experts at Montessori International Academy enabled my wife and I to make decisions about both of our sons’ education here in Japan. The decisions we made were not the intuitively obvious ones, and they’re certainly not what other people expected us to do either. And yet, they’re turning out to be some of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
You can contact Montessori International Academy by visiting their web site at www.monteintel.org
