When bilinguals get together

APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF PARAGRAPHS, FOR SOME REASON I CAN'T GET THE FORMATTING TO WORK TODAY!! A lot has happened in the last few months, my son suddenly will not shut up in three languages! His English has erupted, and although his active Russian is still limited to mainly one word utterances, he is coming out with more and more Russian words and two word combinations when speaking with his dad. For example, he is discovering the possessive ending, and is saying things like "eto mamin/a" (this is mum's). He also claims that I speak only "a little Russian." ("Mama ein bisschen Russisch spricht") Which is upsetting, but true! But he will absolutely not open his mouth around any other Russian speakers! We go to a Russian playgroup once a week, and although he is always really excited about going, he will not say a single word the whole time he is there. However, this was the same at nursery. Last month one of the staff said to me "We have yet to hear his voice!" And just a week later he was chatting away. So I'm curious as to when the breakthrough will happen in Russian. I guess it might take going there for a while. His favourite question these days (in all three languages) is "Whassat?" "was DAS denn?" and in Russian "eto koe?" He insists on calling us "Mummy" and "Daddy" when speaking English, which is causing some upset, especially with his Daddy, but he insists, so what can we do? I tried to tell him that you can also say "Mama" in English, but he said "Mama ist Deutsch". So there you go. Can't argue with that. We had an interesting encounter the other week with my friend's son in Geneva, who is a French/Dutch bilingual. My son started speaking to him in English (This strategy is usually pretty successful in Edinburgh, it's the language that all kids speak!) and my friend's son spoke French (because according to him, that is what all kids speak.) We suggested they try Dutch and German instead, as they might have had more of a chance understanding eachother, but they wouldn't have it. So English and French it was. They seemed to get on well enough, anyway... Loads of friends have approaching me recently about the best "strategies" for raising kids bilingually, and I'm noticing more and more that people are quite stressed out and worried about the prospect of doing things wrong. There seems to be a lot of negative advice around, and although people see the prospect of being multilingual as being really advantageous, they are also concerned about negative effects. Some friends have had advice from parents or educators warning them of not ever mixing their languages, so as not to confuse the child, etc, etc. I think I've pretty much established that all these fears stem from a very monolingual culture, and we should take them with a pinch of salt. I think the best strategy is perhaps to relax about it all a little. As long as there is enough and consistent input in the languages, the rest will come. Kids are pretty amazing.