Chinese-American parents invest in a multilingual future for their children

For Mia Riverton Alpert, passing down her Mandarin language skills to her children is an absolute priority.

“Growing up in the Midwest [United States] in the 1980s, I didn’t have the internet and was at an English-speaking day care,” said the Los Angeles writer and actress who is of both Taiwanese and white American ancestry.

“I didn’t have as much exposure as I wish I’d had to develop fluency. As much as I wanted to impart what I’d grown up with, I actually wanted to build on that scaffold for my children to reach an even higher level of fluency and literacy.”

Riverton Alpert, whose children are eight and four, is among a growing number of Americans who are pouring time and resources into raising a new generation of multilingual children. Their ambition is to position their youngsters to reap the rewards of an increasingly interconnected world.

But while Mandarin immersion schools in the US have boomed in popularity in recent years, American parents across ethnicities and social classes increasingly are opting to take what could be called “the Ivanka Trump route”: hiring Chinese-speaking nannies to boost their children’s Mandarin language skills.

“Americans are notoriously monolingual,” Riverton Alpert said. “So, for those of us who really want our children to stand out, this is one way we can help them climb the ladder of achievement.”