Tongues of potential

My husband and I are trying to raise trilingual children, but I'm not sure how well we are doing. I see parents and families doing just that every day, and it all seems so easy as they banter back and forth in different languages.

In theory it should be just as easy for my husband and me. We speak different mother tongues, and we live in China, with all the possibilities for raising a child fluent in Putonghua that our geographical location allows.

And yet it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. At least it isn't proving to be as easy as we once believed. While pregnant with our first child, I read pretty much everything there was to read on raising bilingual children. And everything I read suggested that this was an easy thing to do, as long as you started early; that is, when the baby was born.

It seemed to be simply a case of each parent communicating with the child or children in their own native language, as well as filling the house with books, music and DVDs in each language. Nearly everything I read stressed that a child's native accent was set before they are a couple of months old, and that if not exposed to a language early enough, they would never master a native accent. I believed it at the time and tried to make my husband believe it, too - even though his sister, whose parents do not speak English, speaks fluent English with an American accent honed from years of watching US television shows.