Intercultural Life
Our son is bilingual and is learning in a simultaneous way. In this video we talk about how we do this and Yul also naturally gives some examples of how he understands both of us.
There will be many more videos on this subject later as he gets older.
In this video we show a day where our son Yul has a photoshoot. He was a model for this kids suit company. We never had plans for our child to do any modelling. Agencies and companies saw his photo and we started to get contacted and asked if he does modelling. He only does a few things, and we say no to most things.
For us, when he does have a photoshoot, we try to make the whole day fun for him. These photos were actually taken over several months with three different sessions. It’s not easy to get a toddler into suits!
I wanted to talk a bit about our thinking behind letting our son do this. We really aren’t interested in pushing our child into a career so we don’t take him to any auditions, we only go when he is already selected to be in a final round and they need a screen test. We only do things where we can get some great photos out of it, or he can have a cool experience. Child modelling is hard, it’s easy to take photos of your kid at home, but it’s much harder to get them to perform in front of a strange photographer or camera man.
For this photoshoot, we really liked the CEO of this kids suit company, and the photographer and staff were very patient and kind. They also wanted to continue to work with Yul after the first shoot, even when they could have picked another model. But now that these sessions have finished, we aren’t interested in him doing any modelling for quite a while. We will consider if any amazing opportunities come up. But for now it’s important that he has a normal childhood.
We do hear horror stories about pushy stage parents and overworked kids in the industry, so we are always thinking about the downside of this. As we show in the video, we try to make the whole day fun for Yul. Luckily these types of studios are very big with lots of space so he can play. Other times when he has been a model for a photography studio the staff have super fun and he has had a great time. But it’s hard to get kids into different outfits and keep a positive mood. As parents we don’t want to be dragging him to many shoots all the time.
So while our son is definitely a natural, we don’t want him to have a career of this at this age. We’ll see what his interest is as he gets older.
It’s been years since we’ve done one of these videos! Let’s check out what Korean convenience stores have to offer when you are looking for a whole meal.
Yul LOVES my makeup. Whenever he sees me applying it he is drawn to it. Unfortunately we have such a small apartment it’s hard to escape him when I want to put it on. So much of my makeup has been sacrificed to keep him happy so I can distract him with some, while I use the other makeup on my face.
It doesn’t matter whether a child is a boy or a girl, they are likely to be drawn to makeup: the colours, the shimmer, the act of applying it. It’s fascinating. I had the idea to buy some kids makeup to give him to play with while I apply mine. In this video we ‘unbox’ the makeup… and Yul is very excited. Since filming this video I’ve discovered my idea works really well! He is happy with his makeup (which leaves no colour or powder as it’s fake) and it gives me the time to apply mine, without little fingers digging into my eye shadow palettes.
As I mentioned in the video, I disliked how much the companies market only to girls. It’s not like I expected a makeup kit just for boys, but they don’t need to constantly use the word “girl” when they could just say “child”. Lots of little boys love to play with makeup and society should be accepting and understanding. Children’s toys are still insanely gendered.
Also, watch to the end of the video to see him giving his toy dinosaurs a makeover!
We know whenever we allow our son to experience things that are not typically “male” we get a few negative comments. For example, when Yul tried on my clothes from when I was his age in the 1980s. (Watch video here). There are some people whose own limited experience has left them so narrow-minded that they can’t handle a little boy wearing a dress for 10 minutes. Never mind that historically it was normal for boys his age to only be wearing dresses. We will be doing our best to raise our son in a way so he doesn’t feel the pressure to conform to a patriarchal society. Also any content we make now can also be removed if when he is older he doesn’t want it online. We try to handle having our family being online in the best way possible, but it’s still a new thing in society and we can only take it step by step.
However, lots of mothers have already said they are going to try this “hack” of fake makeup for their kids, so they can manage to do their own makeup.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel! We make more videos these days and have lots of exciting things coming soon!
Recently we’ve made some videos where we react to racism in both Australia and Korea.
The now infamous TV show that mocked BTS in Australia:
And then soon after that a mayor in Korea used derogatory words to talk about children from multicultural families.
There is a lot we could take about in a blog post, but we are both a bit exhausted at the moment and I think we covered most things in the videos. Later we may revisit these topics.
People are very curious about if our son Yul is learning both English and Korean, so we get a lot of questions. He is learning English and Korean both simultaneously. I mostly speak English to him while Hugh speaks Korean to him, but we also switch languages or repeat the same thing in the other language.
Yul is aware that there are two different languages and understands both. Well, as much as 20 month old toddler can understand. He does speak some words as well, mostly Korean but a few English words too.
We do get A LOT of questions about raising him bilingual. I understand that people are very curious, but he is going through a dinosaur phase where sometimes he’d rather roar like a dinosaur, than say anything. I’m sad that later in life he’ll discover that new dinosaur research suggests that dinosaurs probably honked like geese instead of roaring.
An old fashioned idea that still goes around is that being bilingual will be too confusing for him. Or that he should just focus on one language first. But we know that being bilingual has incredible benefits for him and the research supports us too. But sometimes I can see that people have their own misconceptions about it. For example, sometimes Korean people will try to speak in English to him, but we’ll say “Please speak Korean to him as that’s your native language and he understands it”. But then they will ask him something and expect him to reply! He’s too young! For example, they’ll ask, “How old are you?” He is too young to articulate that yet. But then the person will try to switch back to English, thinking Yul knows no Korean.
We’ve realised as parents, how little people in general understand about child development. Yul also does look a bit older than he is, so people expect him to be speaking full sentences. He says a bunch of words, but it doesn’t mean he is going to respond to your questions! Even when he was 6 months old we had people asking if he spoke English or Korean!
Another aspect of raising a bilingual child is that monolingual people can make judgements on how many words a child knows and perhaps criticize how few they know in their language. But actually a bilingual child usually has the same amount of words as other monolingual children at that age, but they are spread across 2 languages. For example, Yul may say about 10 words in Korean, while Korean kids a similar age are saying 15 or more. BUT, Yul is also saying 5 or 6 words in English which brings the total of words he knows up to a normal level. But only people who are speaking both English and Korean can see the amount of words he knows.
Yul is in a great environment for learning both languages at the same time. If we were in Australia we’d have to make a much bigger effort speaking Korean at home. But since we live in Korea, he hears Korean from Hugh, hears Korean at daycare and just being out in society. And then because English learning is considered so important in Korea, lots of TV shows and toys are switching between Korean and English. His electronic toys all have both Korean and English options and on kids channel they will have English segments. From an early age it’s easy for him to identify the two different languages and that he can switch between them depending on the situation.
Studies done on bilingual children have shown how good it is for the brain to know two or more languages. Bilingual children also tend to have a higher level of empathy as before they speak to someone they evaluate the situation, who the person is, and decide which language to use.
I’m sure I’ll have many more comics about being bilingual in the future!
As I mention in the video, we had 3 or 4 videos lined up and loosely scripted to film 2 days ago… and then realised it was a public holiday and there was no daycare for Yul. It’s impossible to film those types of videos when Yul is home. We would have filmed yesterday instead but Hugh flew out to Japan for the weekend. So I decided to vlog my day instead for a video. It ended up being a day and a half technically, but the timing worked out because I could show Sara and I recording the first episodes of our new podcast.
Sara (HojuSara on YouTube) and I have been planning to do a podcast for quite a while and finally it’s happening. We’ve been sponsored the equipment and have a producer (Kait who is from my area of Australia!) so it’s going to be coming soon!
The air has been a lot better these past few days in Seoul. We had a good amount of rain, which clears away the pollution. So I took the opportunity to take Yul to the nearby parks at the river. He had a nice time wandering around and looking at bugs. The Han river parks near where we live are a lot less crowded than many others, and have lots of shade from trees, which I’m so grateful for. It’s never easy going anywhere with a toddler and even harder in the summer heat.
Once Hugh is back from Japan we’ll be filming a bunch of stuff. Also I have many comic ideas lined up, just trying to adjust my schedule to fit it all in.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel here!
I’m also on a radio show on tbs eFM called “Real Mom, Real Talk” which you can listen to if you are in Korea on Saturday mornings, or you can listen as a podcast on various podcast sites.
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