Raising multilingual children is an exciting adventure, but it’s common for parents to feel uncertain about where to start or what to prioritize in their family’s daily life.
In my experience as both a mom of trilingual kids and a guide for multilingual families, the practices and habits that support home langauges in multilingual homes don’t need to be extravagant or artificial. On the contrary, it’s more effective to weave small, consistent actions into everyday family life and stick with them long term.
In this article, I’ll share some simple and practical strategies—routines, games, and shared reading moments—designed for families who want to nurture Italian and/ore other heritage languages at home, without stress or pressure.
How to Make Time for Italian
Think about a typical day or week in your family: how much time do your children spend immersed in the community language (e.g. at school or extracurriculars) and how much time do they spend immersed in the home language(s)?
To visualize this, you can create a chart of your family’s weekly “language schedule,” using different colors to represent each language.
Let’s say Italian is green. Once you identify your family’s “green moments,” you can begin making the most of them.
The best way to make most of the time you have in your family/heritage language is to focus on activities that are:
- Consistent
- Predictable
- Enjoyable (for you, not just for you kids)
- Bonus: Shared with other children or as part of a community
Notice anything? These are the same qualities that define routines!
Anyone who works with children (or parents them) knows that routines are essential, because predictability gives kids a sense of safety in a world that’s still new and unpredictable to them.
Repeated actions performed together, especially with a parent or caregiver (i.e. a loved one), strengthen children’s build emotional bonds and create a sense of belonging. These shared moments are also ideal opportunities for developing language skills in the minority language(s).
Try These Three Simples Routines in Italian
Now that you’ve found time for Italian and understand the value of a consistent routine, let’s make these moments linguistically meaningful.
That means:
- They include in-person interaction with a caring adult
- They involve active, back-and-forth communication
- Ideally, the Italian input is rich and varied (books help here—we’ll get there soon!)
Every family is different, and what works will depend on your child(ren)’s age, personality, and interests. Below are three activities that, based on my experience with kids and families, work well for families raising multilingual kids with Italian.
1. Sing It!
According to Claudia Calì, Professor of Music Education at Queens College (CUNY) and and expert in music and multilingualism:
Languages are made of sounds, with specific pitch and frequency ranges. In early childhood, kids don’t distinguish between speaking and singing. They speak with a singing voice and hear everything as music. Exposure to music sharpens their ear and expands auditory perception. That’s why learning songs in different languages not only enriches vocabulary but also trains the ear to recognize tonal and rhythmic (and even syntactic) structures.
Marking key moments of the day, like the evening bedtime routine (bath, teeth, pajamas, story), with music and songs is a simple, enjoyable, and repeatable way to nurture your children’s Italian in a way that’s also emotionally meaningful.
2. Who’s Cooking Tonight? I Am!
If you have little chefs at home, a great idea for a weekly routine is to set aside one day a week to cook dinner together. Dinner needs to be made anyway: why not turn it into a special moment in Italian?
Depending on your children’s age and how much time you have, you could start by choosing a recipe the weekend before (from an Italian cookbook, blog, or website), make a shopping list together, and then go out and buy any missing ingredients. These three simple steps are also three wonderful opportunities to practice Italian, both written and spoken!
When your chosen dinner day arrives, you’ll be all set to cook and enjoy the fruits of your labor together. Do it just twice or three times and it will already be something your kids look forward to all week!
Pro tip 1: Choose simple recipes with ingredients that young children can handle (they can wash fruits or vegetables, mix cold ingredients, or butter a baking dish).
Pro tip 2: To make this moment even more special, consider getting matching aprons (like the ones that you can get custom-embroidery in Italy).
3. The Enchanted Hour
In her book The Enchanted Hour, Megan Cox Gurdon writes that she dedicated one hour every evening for over twenty years to reading aloud with her children. She calls this ritual “the enchanted hour.”
In my own experience as a mom, shared reading time is a moment of intimacy and cuddles; a calm, cozy space for connection through stories and adventures.
In our family, my husband and I take turns reading aloud in the evenings (he reads in Cantonese, I read in Italian, and we leave English to school or, now that the older ones can read on their own, to independent reading). We usually snuggle up together on the bed or couch, and each of our three kids picks a book. Evenings are the quietest part of our day and when we almost always read, but it doesn’t have to be the only time. You can read first thing in the morning, after a meal, while waiting for dinner, at the doctor’s office, or even at the park.
In addition to being a moment of intimacy and connection between parent and child, shared reading aloud supports language and cognitive development, strengthens focus and visualization skills, and, thanks to the power of routine, offers a sense of comfort and stability.
In our case, books have also become a kind of safe haven for my children. When they’re upset or hurt, they often run to me in tears and say, “Can we go read a book?” It’s their way of finding calm.
If you’d love to share a reading moment in Italian with your child but aren’t sure where to start, here’s a curated list of high-quality books in Italian for children aged 0 to 8.
Italian Language Games for Multilingual Children
If your family enjoys gathering around the table or on the couch in the evening or during downtime, here are three simple Italian-language games you can play even with very young children. These are great tools for nurturing Italian at home in a relaxed, joyful way.
1. Flashcards
Flashcards are incredibly simple and versatile tools. I recommend ones that have just pictures, or a picture on one side and the Italian word on the other. Italian-only cards are ideal.
A favorite game with toddlers (starting around age one) is simply flipping through the cards one by one and naming the image aloud. As adults, we might forget, but the act of naming in and of itself is a full and pleasurable experience for a small child. I hope you get to see how much fun they have in savoring the first ever sounds they get to make, or to intently watch your mouth as you articolate names for them!
Moreover, recognizing an object, animal, or person and saying its name is a multi-sensorial experience that engages sight, sound, and even touch, especially if the flashcards are textured. This is also where children’s love for rhymes and the sound of poetry is born.
Pro Tip 1: Be patient. Give your child time to remember and find the word.
Pro Tip 2: If the word doesn’t come, or comes in another language, simply offer the Italian word without further comment. They may repeat it, or not. Either way, just move on. If the game catches on, you’ll play it many more times!
Pro Tip 3: Avoid pressing questions like “What’s this? So what do we call it?” This is a game, not a test!
2. Memory Games
There are dozens of memory matching games out there, but no matter the theme, one thing is true: the kids will win.
If it doesn’t come naturally to you, try to remember to name the object on each card out loud when you turn it over: this is a great way to increase exposure to Italian vocabulary. You can also name the objects at the end when counting the pairs.
If you’d like to change it up without filling your house with boxes, there are many printable memory games available online. For example:
If your child has a favorite, you can laminate it for repeated use.
3. Dobble (Spot it!)
This fast-paced matching game, known as Dobble or Spot it! depending on where you live, consists of round cards that are covered in a series of images. Any two cards will always have one image in common.
While the game is already designed to be played in multiple ways, you can also create your own rules.
With my three-year-old, for example, we simply use the cards as a visual game: I flip through them, and he points and names the items aloud. He loves this because he gets to play with the same cards as his older siblings, which makes him feel proud and included.
One Step at a Time: Simple, Fun, Repeatable Activities
I hope that these ideas have inspired you to weave Italian routines and activities into your multilingual family life.
Remember: consistent small steps will take you much farther than the occasional sprint.
Choose activities and books you genuinely enjoy; if they’re pleasant, repeating them will come naturally. Focus on consistency, both throughout the day and in the long term.
If you’re not sure where to start or what to prioritize and you’d like personalized support, I’d be happy to guide you on your multilingual journey with your children.
