Until 8 months ago my (35F) kids (oldest 7) only spoke English. They mostly understood my husband's native language, because he spoke it to them and they learned it in school, but we would translate when they would speak to my MIL (65f) when we came to visit 1-2 times a year as she doesn't speak English. Now that we moved to my husband's native country, my kids speak his language and can actually speak to my MIL. I have been making an extra effort to only speak English to my kids now. Especially since my 4 year old picked up the language super fast and nearly stopped speaking English for a month or two. Now he will speak to me in English, probably because when he didn't a few times I pretended to not understand what he was saying until he said it in English. So now I only speak English with the kids.
I thought we would see my MIL more often, but we end up seeing her every 2-4 weeks. She doesn't understand English, and has made no effort to learn, even though she said that it was so sad for her that she couldn't converse with our kids for 6 years (she had plenty of time for art classes during that time). She does know English letters and she lives in a city where most of the population speaks English because it's valued as a second language. My husband thinks it would be nicer if I spoke his language around her. It's not my native language, but I use it for work and can communicate when I need to. He always spoke English around my parents when we lived near them and they used to watch our kids. (But they never really had a chance or reason to learn his language) He thinks it wasn't nice when I came home from work one day (my late day when I'm out of the house for 11 hours and come home exhausted) and started telling him how my day was in English even though his mother was at our house. I felt like I have a right to come home and talk about my exhausting day in my native tongue. He thinks I should have asked him to go to our bedroom if I had something important to tell him.
Tl;Dr My MIL doesn't understand English. Is it wrong if I speak to my kids in English around her?
Submitted April 24, 2020 at 05:06AM by LovingFamily31 https://ift.tt/2x5qpHn
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