It's Never Just About the Language: Raising Multilingual Kids with Maria "Mimi" Potvin | Ep 96

We're taught that children are sponges, that if you move abroad, they'll simply absorb the new language and everything will be fine. Maria "Mimi" Potvin, linguist and founder of Growing Up Multilingual, is here with a fuller, more honest story.

Mimi joins Mickelle to talk about the part of multilingual life no one prepares you for: not how children gain a language, but what happens when a home language quietly begins to slip away and what that costs a family over time. Drawing on her research and her own life across Bulgaria, Germany, and the Netherlands, she reframes language as identity, belonging, and emotional connection rather than vocabulary.

It's a tender, clear-eyed conversation about raising confident multilingual children without turning your home into a classroom and about coming home to the languages inside yourself.

In this episode:

The number one myth parents believe about raising multilingual kids
Why "translation is not transmission," and how language is emotion
Communicative vs. academic language, and the two "backpacks" a child carries
How a home language becomes a child's one constant through every move
Why Mimi says, quietly, "I survived because of language"
Heritage language as a homecoming, for the child and the parent

Find Mimi at growingupmultilingual.com, on Instagram @growingup_multilingual, and on Substack at Multilingual-ish.

For more about this episode, visit https://www.houseofperegrine.com/podcast/ep-096

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