Helping a Russian-Speaking Child in the US Adjust and Make Friends

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Rita is nine, arrived outside Columbus in August, and by November her mother had said both of these to her in the same week. Try to join in more. Don’t forget your Russian.

You are asking for two things and the child has one year

Both instructions are reasonable. Both were said warmly. And in the first year after a move they compete for the same thing, which is not the child’s loyalty but her capacity.

A newly arrived nine-year-old spends most of what she has on decoding. Where to sit. What the joke was. Whether you can sit here if you want meant an invitation or a politeness. Every one of those questions is answered automatically by a local child and consciously by a new one, and conscious costs.

Whatever is left over is what you are asking them to spend on Russian.

What the first year actually takes

I arrived as an adult with a profession, a plan, and what I believed was a functional command of English, and that winter cost me things I did not expect to lose.

I stopped reading for pleasure for about eight months. Not deliberately, and I didn’t make a decision about it. Reading in English was work, reading in Russian felt like an indulgence I could not justify at the end of a day that had already gone badly, and the books simply stopped happening. Nobody had asked me to give it up, and I couldn’t have told you it was gone. It went because something had to, and it was the thing with no deadline attached. A child in the same year makes the same arithmetic without knowing it, and what goes is whichever thing nobody is counting.

My books came back the following fall, and I remember the evening precisely because of how ordinary it was. I picked one up, read forty pages, and only noticed afterward that nothing about it had felt like effort. Nobody had intervened. The decoding had simply gotten cheaper, and the capacity it had been eating gave itself back.

A child corrected me and I heard the year in it

My second spring here, a twelve-year-old stopped me mid-sentence in a lesson. You said it wrong. She was right, and she was pleased, and she went on being pleased for the rest of the hour in a way she had not been about anything in the previous four months. Eighteen months earlier I had been that child, and had not enjoyed it once. What separated us was not confidence. It was that by spring she had capacity to spare, and correcting an adult costs almost nothing when you have some.

The resolution is a schedule, not a choice

You don’t have to pick.

You sequence. The first year is not the year to grow anything. It is for English and for the room your child is actually sitting in every day. Protect the Russian rather than growing it. Keep it in use, keep it attached to things that are not work, and retire the sentence сказать это по-русски for twelve months.

Year two is when you get to be ambitious

Growth comes back when decoding gets cheaper and there is capacity again. This is not a compromise. It is the only order that works, and families who reverse it usually end up with a resentful child and worse Russian than if they had waited.

For my first two or three years of teaching here I told families to do both at once, in good faith, because both were obviously worth having and nobody had explained to me that a year is a finite quantity. The families who ignored me did better.

Rita’s mother stopped asking in December and started reading to her instead, badly and in Russian, which Rita found funny enough to correct. You said it wrong again. That was the entire intervention that year. The one thing worth adding in year one is other children who speak it, because that costs a child nothing in the currency she is short of. Our piece on soft skills in two languages covers why the situations matter more than the vocabulary, and the piece on making friends covers the English half of the same year. At Palme School we teach online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for parents in our resource library.

Frequently asked questions

How do I help my child adjust to a new country without losing Russian?

Sequence the two rather than pursuing both at full strength. Year one protects the Russian and spends the child’s capacity on English; year two is when the Russian grows again.

My immigrant child has no friends. How long should I wait?

Most children need a full school year, and the second one looks different from the first. Sustained isolation past that, or distress that lasts months, is worth raising with the school.

Will speaking Russian at home slow down my child’s English?

No, and our first piece in this series takes apart the sentence families most often hear at conferences, along with the research on why it is wrong. The harder practical problem runs the other way: English arrives whether you plan it or not, and Russian only survives if somebody arranges for it.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials for parents

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.