Kateryna Ivanova
You went to the appointment with one worry — your three-year-old says far less than other children his age — and you came out with two. The speech therapist listened, asked about home, and then said the sentence that has been going round your head ever since: "Stop the English. He needs one language first."
So now you are sitting with a decision no parent should have to make alone. Drop something you have built patiently for a year, in case it is the problem. Or keep it, and risk being the mother who was warned and carried on anyway.
This guide is the honest version of that answer. Not "bilingualism is always wonderful" — that is a slogan, and your child's delay is real. Instead: what the research has actually tested, what it has not tested (which turns out to matter enormously for your situation), what the professional bodies instruct therapists to do, how a multilingual child should be assessed, and how to decide for your own family — including when pausing English is the reasonable choice.
Please read this first
This article is education, not a diagnosis and not medical advice. If you are worried about your child's speech, the single most useful thing you can do is get an assessment — and keep it, even if someone tells you the delay is "just bilingualism". Nothing here is a reason to delay, cancel or replace professional help.
Short answer
Across studies of children with language disorder, autism and Down syndrome, bilingual children did not do worse than children with the same condition raised with one language — so bilingualism is not the cause of your child's delay, and dropping a language is not a treatment. The UK's professional body for speech therapists states that parents should never be advised to abandon the home language. But be careful which language that argument protects: it protects Ukrainian, the language you speak best. Nearly all of this research studied families who needed two languages, not a mother electively adding English — that exact situation has not been studied. The defensible position for a delayed child is: get assessed in both languages, protect rich Ukrainian above everything, and keep English only in its small playful form — or pause it without shame while the delay is being treated.
Where "drop the English" comes from
It is worth knowing that the advice is not malice, and usually not laziness either. It comes from three real places.
It is intuitive. If a child is struggling to build one language, adding a second sounds like adding weight to someone already carrying too much. The intuition is powerful — and, as we will see, the evidence does not support it.
It is common practice. This is documented rather than anecdotal. In a systematic review of children with autism from bilingual families, Drysdale, van der Meer and Kagohara (2015) examined eight studies covering 182 children and the perceptions of 62 parents, and reported that the majority of parents said practitioners predominantly advised against providing a bilingual environment. Feltmate and Kay-Raining Bird's (2008) study of children with Down syndrome opens by noting the same practice: some professionals counsel families to restrict input to a single language. In a survey of 49 parents of children with autism, Kay-Raining Bird, Lamond and Holden (2012) found that three-quarters were raising their child bilingually — and that professionals did not always support that choice.
It is often given by someone who cannot assess the other language. A therapist who does not speak Ukrainian can only test in English or Arabic. A child who scores low in a language they barely hear looks impaired. Simplifying the child down to one testable language makes the clinician's job possible — but it measures exposure, not ability.
None of this means your therapist is wrong about your child. It means the specific instruction — remove a language — deserves the scrutiny the rest of this article gives it.
The distinction that changes the whole answer
Almost everything written about bilingualism and speech delay quietly assumes one kind of family: parents whose languages are simply who they are. A Ukrainian mother and a Spanish father in London. A Polish family in Berlin whose grandparents speak no German. For those families, dropping a language means cutting a child off from a grandmother, a country, an identity. That is why the advice to drop it is so strongly opposed.
Your situation may be different, and the difference is not small.
| Necessary bilingualism | Elective English (probably you) | |
|---|---|---|
| Why the language is there | It is the family's or the community's language | You chose to add it, for your child's future |
| Who speaks it | A parent, grandparents, the whole country | Usually you, in short rituals, often not fluently |
| What dropping it costs | Family relationships, identity, belonging | A head start, which can be rebuilt later |
| What the research studied | This | Essentially nothing |
This matters in both directions. It means the strongest protective statements in this article — never abandon the home language — apply first and foremost to Ukrainian, not to English. And it means the reassuring research findings, which come from necessary bilingualism, transfer to your situation more weakly than a blog post claiming "science says bilingualism is fine!" would suggest.
Hold both of those thoughts. The rest of the article is built on them.
What the research actually shows
The central question researchers have asked is a fair one: if you compare children who have the same condition, and the only difference is that some grew up with two languages and some with one, do the bilingual children do worse?
The broadest synthesis is Uljarević, Katsos, Hudry and Gibson (2016), a practitioner review in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry covering 50 studies across communication disorders, autism and intellectual disability. Their summary is direct: studies finding a disadvantage for multilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders were rare, and when you look only at studies comparing multilingual and monolingual children who have similar disorders, the findings consistently show no adverse effects. In autism, they note some positive effects on communication and social functioning.
The same authors are careful, and so should we be: the pool of studies is small and relatively few are methodologically strong. The honest claim is "no evidence of harm", not "proof that it makes no difference". Anyone telling you the science is settled in either direction is overselling.
The other finding worth knowing comes from Kay-Raining Bird, Genesee and Verhoeven's (2016) narrative review in the Journal of Communication Disorders. Children who grew up with both languages from the start had communication skills similar to children with the same disorder raised in one language, when you look at their stronger language or at both languages together. But children who added the second language later showed differences on some second-language measures that had not fully closed even after extended exposure. That is a real, inconvenient nuance, and it points the same way as everything else here: the delay shows up most in the added language, which for your child is English.
Condition by condition: DLD, autism, Down syndrome
| Condition | Study | Who was studied | What was found |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language disorder (DLD/SLI) | Paradis, Crago, Genesee & Rice (2003) | 8 French–English bilingual children with SLI vs monolingual peers with SLI | Similar accuracy on tense marking; the bilingual children did not show deeper deficits |
| Gutiérrez-Clellen, Simon-Cereijido & Wagner (2008) | 71 children aged 4;5–6;5 across five groups | Bilinguals with impairment showed the same difficulties as monolinguals with impairment; no evidence the other language caused the errors | |
| Autism | Hambly & Fombonne (2012) | 45 bilingually exposed vs 30 monolingual children, mean age 56 months | No significant differences in language level; no additional delays from bilingual exposure |
| Drysdale, van der Meer & Kagohara (2015) | Review: 8 studies, 182 children, 62 parents | No negative impact on language development — while most parents were advised against bilingualism | |
| Down syndrome | Feltmate & Kay-Raining Bird (2008) | 4 bilingual children with DS, each matched in a triad | Delays in both languages, but no consistent effect of bilingualism; all four were developing functional second-language skills |
| Cleave, Kay-Raining Bird, Trudeau & Sutton (2014) | 14 bilingual and 12 monolingual children with DS, plus typically developing comparisons | No evidence bilingualism harmed the skills tested; authors concluded parents should be supported in choosing bilingual input |
Notice the sample sizes: eight children, four children, fourteen children. This is a literature of small studies pointing consistently in one direction, not a handful of enormous trials. That consistency is meaningful — and it is still worth saying out loud rather than dressing the evidence up.
What you can take from this table is narrow but solid: if your child has a genuine language disorder, growing up with two languages is not what caused it, and removing one language is not a treatment for it. A disorder is a disorder in both languages.
What the research has never tested — your situation
Here is the part that most articles will not tell you, because it weakens a tidy conclusion.
Every study above looked at children who were bilingual because their family or community required it. I could find no study of the precise situation this article is about: a non-native-speaking mother electively adding English at home, during the preschool years, to a child who already has a diagnosed or suspected delay.
That absence is the honest finding, and it cuts against easy reassurance. When someone tells you "research shows bilingualism won't hurt your delayed child", they are borrowing a conclusion from families whose circumstances differ from yours in the one variable you control: whether the second language is there by necessity or by choice.
So what should you do with a gap? Reason from the nearest evidence, carefully, and be honest about the distance. Two bodies of research come closest.
Children with DLD learning English as a foreign language
There is a small but genuinely relevant literature on children with developmental language disorder who learn English as a foreign language at school — children who, like yours, are not surrounded by English and are adding it deliberately. Much of it comes from Elena Tribushinina and colleagues, and some of it studied Russian-speaking children, which makes it closer to home than most.
Three findings matter for you:
- Progress is possible, but not automatic. In a two-year study (Tribushinina, Dubinkina-Elgart & Rabkina, 2020), children with DLD and typically developing peers started at a similar level, but over two years the typically developing group improved significantly and the DLD group did not.
- Structured, explicit support changes that. In a classroom intervention with 75 pupils (Tribushinina and colleagues, 2022), explicit teaching that deliberately compared the two languages produced improvement in English and in the children's first language — though effects were small and children varied a great deal.
- Incidental exposure does not work the same way. In a smaller study (Stolvoort, Mackaaij & Tribushinina, 2024), the amount and length of informal English exposure did not predict performance in learners with DLD — in stark contrast to the pattern in typically developing learners, and attributed to difficulty with implicit learning. In the same literature, a later start was repeatedly associated with better outcomes.
Translate that into a kitchen in Dubai. For a typically developing toddler, songs, rituals and a puppet quietly do their work in the background — that is the entire premise of learning through everyday life. For a child with a language disorder, the same background exposure may simply not convert, and the same result may need explicit, repetitive, deliberately supported teaching that is well beyond what a home ritual is designed to do.
That is not a reason for despair, and it is certainly not a reason to abandon your child's Ukrainian. It is a reason to be realistic about what daily English can achieve right now, and to put your effort where it will do the most good.
What the professional bodies instruct therapists to do
If your therapist's advice and their profession's guidance disagree, it helps to know precisely what the guidance says.
| Body | What it states |
|---|---|
| RCSLT (UK) | That parents and carers "should never be advised to abandon home language in favour of the majority language… under any circumstances", because such an approach is not supported by the evidence base and leads to poor outcomes for the child. It also asks for the care pathway to be provided in the home language. |
| ASHA (US) | That "being multilingual is not a communication disorder"; that signs of a disorder appear across all the languages a person uses; that speech samples should be obtained in all languages the client uses; and that clinicians should advocate for multilingualism to families who have been told they should avoid using certain languages. |
| IALP (international) | That it is positive to encourage families to keep using their home languages, and that children with DLD can learn more than one language given sufficient opportunity — acquiring more than one language does not make the disorder more severe. |
Two honest footnotes. First, the RCSLT prohibition is about the home language — for your family, Ukrainian. It is not a licence to insist on English. Second, similar statements circulate online attributed loosely to "the NHS"; the wording I could verify belongs to an individual NHS trust rather than a national page, so the strong quote to rely on is RCSLT's.
Is it a delay, or is it bilingualism?
Both things are real, and confusing them causes damage in both directions: a real disorder dismissed as "just bilingualism", or a normal bilingual pattern treated as a disorder.
| What you see | Usually normal bilingual development | Worth assessing |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Knows fewer words in one language, but the combined total across both is age-appropriate | Few words in both languages combined |
| Mixing | Mixes both languages in one sentence — a normal, rule-governed pattern | Mixing plus very limited sentences in either language |
| A quiet period | A silent period in a new language while the home language keeps developing | Quiet in the home language too, or losing words once used |
| Understanding | Understands far more than they say in the newer language | Limited understanding in the home language |
| Sounds | Age-typical sound substitutions in both languages | Speech others cannot understand at three; very few consonants |
| Gestures | Points, shows, leads you, uses gestures richly | Few gestures, little pointing, limited interest in interaction |
Two things belong to normal bilingual development and are not evidence of a problem by themselves: a silent period in the newer language and age-typical mispronunciations. Two things always deserve a professional look: limited language in the home language, and losing skills a child previously had.
Red flags by age
The clearest public checklist comes from the CDC's "Learn the Signs. Act Early." milestones, which are set at what most children can do by that age. For a bilingual child, count across both languages: a word in either language counts once.
| Age | Most children can |
|---|---|
| 12 months | Wave bye-bye; call a parent "mama" or "dada" or another special name; understand "no" (pause or stop briefly) |
| 2 years | Point to things in a book when asked; say at least two words together, such as "More milk"; point to at least two body parts when asked; use gestures beyond waving and pointing |
| 3 years | Have a conversation with at least two back-and-forth exchanges; ask "who", "what", "where" or "why" questions; say what is happening in a picture; say their first name; talk well enough to be understood by others, most of the time |
| 4 years | Say sentences of four or more words; say some words from a song or story; talk about one thing that happened during the day; answer simple questions such as "What is a coat for?" |
| 5 years | Tell a story with at least two events; answer simple questions about a story; keep a conversation going over more than three exchanges; use or recognise simple rhymes |
The CDC's own instruction is the part to take to heart: you know your child best; if your child is not meeting one or more milestones, has lost skills they once had, or you have other concerns, do not wait — talk to your child's doctor and ask about developmental screening. Losing skills previously acquired is a red flag at any age, on its own.
How a multilingual child should be assessed
Testing a bilingual child in one language and comparing the score to monolingual norms is the single biggest source of wrong answers — in both directions. A bilingual child's knowledge is spread across two languages, so a single-language score tends to under-count what the child knows.
There is good evidence for doing it properly. Peña, Bedore and Kester (2016) tested 78 bilingual children, 15 of whom had language impairment, and found that looking at both languages together classified children correctly more than 85% of the time — and noted that even with careful scoring, bilingual children may score below typical monolingual peers on a single-language vocabulary test. Their conclusion was that assessment approaches should consider both languages together.
| What good assessment includes | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Samples in all the child's languages | ASHA's stated standard; a disorder shows across languages, though symptoms differ between them |
| A qualified interpreter when the clinician does not speak Ukrainian | Lets the home language be assessed rather than guessed at; the therapist still leads the session |
| Caution with standardised tests | IALP notes norm-referenced tests are often unsuitable for multilingual children because there is no suitable comparison group |
| Alternatives: criterion-referenced measures, dynamic assessment, non-word repetition | They measure learning and processing rather than accumulated exposure |
| Parent report and conceptual scoring | A word known in either language counts once, giving a fairer total |
| Analysis of the minority language | IALP advises against deciding on the majority language alone |
What to ask the therapist
You are not there to argue with a professional, and a therapist who says "drop English" is usually trying to help. These questions turn a verdict into a conversation.
| Ask | What you are really finding out |
|---|---|
| "Which languages was he assessed in?" | Whether the result reflects ability or exposure |
| "Can we look at his Ukrainian too — with an interpreter if needed?" | Whether the home language has been seen at all |
| "When you counted his words, did words he only knows in Ukrainian count?" | Whether conceptual scoring was used |
| "Do you see the difficulty in both of his languages?" | The core diagnostic question for any bilingual child |
| "Which language do you recommend for therapy itself, and why?" | Often the key practical decision — usually the strongest, most emotionally natural language |
| "If we reduce English, what exactly should replace that time?" | Turns removal into a plan; quiet time replacing English helps nobody |
| "What should we see in three months, and what would tell us to change course?" | Gives you a review point instead of an open-ended verdict |
If the answer to "which languages was he assessed in" is "English only", you have learned something important — and asking for the home language to be included is a reasonable, evidence-backed request, not a challenge to their expertise.
Keep, shrink or pause: a decision guide
There is no single right answer for every family, and any article that gives you one is not paying attention to your child. Use this instead.
| Your situation | Reasonable choice |
|---|---|
| Ukrainian is developing typically; English is the only weak area | Keep English, in its small playful form. This looks like a newer-language pattern, not a disorder |
| Both languages are behind; assessment is booked or under way | Shrink English to a few sung, joyful minutes. Put the freed time into rich Ukrainian interaction |
| Diagnosed disorder; therapy running in Ukrainian or Arabic | Shrink or pause. Therapy targets come first. English stays as songs and books if it is a pleasure, not a task |
| English has become a source of pressure, tears or refusal | Pause. A language that costs you the relationship is not buying a head start |
| You speak English with difficulty and your Ukrainian input is thin because of it | Pause English, deliberately. Your child needs the richest possible language from you, and that is Ukrainian |
| Your child is thriving, chatty in Ukrainian, and enjoys English | Carry on. Nothing here is a reason to stop |
That last row matters. If you arrived here anxious after a passing comment, and your child is developing well, this article is not telling you to stop anything.
One finding is worth holding on to whichever row you are in. In a study of 50 bilingual preschoolers, Unsworth, Brouwer, de Bree and Verhagen (2019) found that the proportion of native input and having a native-speaker parent were never significant predictors of children's language skills — what mattered was how proficient the non-native speakers were, along with patterns of parental language use and the richness of the language children heard. The study looked at typically developing children learning the language of their country, so it does not settle your case. But it does dispose of one worry: you do not need to be a native speaker. What you need is to be rich, warm and comprehensible in whichever language you are using — which, when your child is struggling, is almost certainly Ukrainian. If you want the fuller picture for a typically developing child, see teaching your child English when you are not fluent.
If you pause English
Pausing is a legitimate decision, and it is not failure. Do it in a way that costs you nothing later.
- Pause the lessons, keep the pleasure. Songs, a favourite book, a puppet who says three words — none of that is "teaching", and none of it needs to go.
- Do not announce it to your child. There is nothing to explain and nothing lost. English simply gets quieter for a while.
- Put the time somewhere. Removing English and replacing it with nothing helps no one; replacing it with more ritual-shaped interaction in Ukrainian helps a great deal.
- Set a review date. Three months, or the next appointment. A pause with a date is a plan; a pause without one tends to become permanent by accident.
- Keep the sounds alive at zero effort. An English song in the car costs nothing and keeps the ear familiar.
- Know that restarting works. Children regain a paused language faster than they built it, and starting at four or five is not too late. When you are ready, restarting without guilt is its own small skill.
If you continue, what "enough support" means
If you and your therapist agree that English stays, the foreign-language research above suggests the form matters more for your child than for a typically developing one. Background exposure alone is unlikely to be enough.
| Instead of | Do this |
|---|---|
| Lots of new words | Very few words, repeated far more often than feels necessary |
| Varied activities each day | The same two or three rituals in the same order, every day |
| Full sentences aimed at the child | One or two words paired with the action, then a pause and a wait |
| Questions that test ("What colour is this?") | Comments that describe ("Blue cup. Blue.") |
| Cartoons as the main input | Live, face-to-face interaction with you; screens are the weakest teacher here |
| Correcting mistakes | Repeating the child's attempt back correctly, without demanding a redo — see correcting mistakes |
| Expecting speech | Accepting pointing, gestures and single sounds as full communication |
Two supports worth borrowing from the evidence: make links between the languages explicit ("cat — кіт"), because contrastive teaching helped children with DLD, and let a character carry the language so no demand lands on your child — the English-speaking teddy works particularly well for children who freeze when spoken to directly.
Why Ukrainian comes first
If you take one thing from this article, take this: the strongest evidence-based protection available to your child is rich, warm, plentiful Ukrainian. Not because English is harmful — but because Ukrainian is where you are most fluent and most playful, where you can expand what your child says, and where you will notice what is missing.
There is a practical reason too. A disorder shows up in the language a child knows best. If your Ukrainian input thins out — because your attention went to English, or because English made speaking feel like work — you lose both the therapy foundation and your clearest window onto the problem.
Protecting Ukrainian is not a consolation prize. It is the best-supported step available to you, and it is not something a therapist is likely to ask you to reduce. For the wider picture of keeping Ukrainian strong abroad, see English for Ukrainian children abroad.
What to do while you wait for an assessment
Waiting lists are long. The weeks before an appointment are not empty weeks.
| Do | How |
|---|---|
| Keep a two-week word list | Write down every word your child uses, in either language, and roughly when. This is the single most useful thing you can bring to an appointment |
| Record two short videos | One minute of play and one minute of a meal. Clinicians learn more from this than from any description |
| Note understanding separately from speech | What your child follows without gestures matters as much as what they say |
| Check hearing | Repeated ear infections and glue ear are common, treatable and easily missed |
| Note gestures and interaction | Pointing, showing and leading you by the hand are important positive signs |
| Flood the day with Ukrainian | Narrate, sing, read, wait for answers — see tracking progress at home |
| Keep English tiny and joyful | Songs and books, no demands, no testing |
Mistakes that make it harder
- Accepting "it's just bilingualism" without an assessment. This is the error that delays help, and it is as common as the opposite advice. Bilingualism does not explain limited language across both languages.
- Dropping Ukrainian instead of English. The genuinely harmful version of this decision — and the one professional guidance explicitly warns against.
- Turning English into testing. "What's this? And this?" raises pressure, lowers output and tells you nothing you could not learn by watching.
- Replacing interaction with screens. Understandable when you are exhausted, but for a child who is behind, live interaction is where the work happens.
- Silent worry. Anxiety leaks into the room. Children who feel watched speak less.
- Judging by English alone. Progress in the home language is progress, full stop.
- Treating the pause as permanent. A paused language is not a lost one.
Where Mommy & Me English fits — honestly
The Mommy & Me English course was designed for typically developing children aged one to five: daily rituals, songs and play that let English grow inside ordinary family life, without textbooks or drilling. It was built by Kateryna Ivanova, whose qualifications include Trinity College London CertTESOL, NILE Young Learners training, and Ukrainian Specialist diplomas in speech therapy and primary education, with more than nine years of teaching young children.
If your child has a diagnosed or suspected delay, here is the honest positioning: this course is not speech therapy and does not replace it. No home programme does, and you should be wary of any that claims otherwise. What the method can offer a family in your situation is the shape that helps all children communicate — short predictable rituals, repetition, few words, long pauses, no testing — and much of that works just as well in Ukrainian while you wait for or work through therapy.
Start free: the starter guide gives you the first rituals and the exact phrases for them — get the free starter guide. Use the structure in whichever language your child needs most right now.
Frequently asked questions
The questions parents ask most often when a speech delay and a second language meet.
In short
Your child's delay is real, and it deserves assessment and treatment rather than a debate about languages. But the specific instruction to drop English does not hold up the way it is usually given: across studies of children with language disorder, autism and Down syndrome, bilingual children did not do worse than children with the same condition raised in one language, and the UK's professional body tells therapists never to advise abandoning the home language.
Be precise about what that protects, though. It protects Ukrainian. The research studied families who needed two languages, not mothers electively adding English — and for children with language disorders, the closest evidence suggests that casual background exposure does not convert into learning the way it does for other children.
So: get assessed in both languages, insist that Ukrainian is looked at, protect rich Ukrainian above everything, and let English be small, sung and joyful — or pause it, with a date to revisit. None of those choices makes you a mother who gave up. They make you a mother who put her child's language first, which was the point of the English all along.
