I have a question regarding my child’s upbringing: Should I raise my child in our (my couple and I) three native languages (I'm bilingual Spanish and French and she's German), or could there be negative consequences in the long run?
Thanks,
J.R.J.

To answer this question I would first have to ask many others. But to give you some general guidelines, I will say that there are many trilingual children in the world and it’s due to the fact that their parents, and others close to them, spoke to them from the beginning (even when they still couldn’t understand) in several languages.
The issue of when and how to introduce a third language is one of the questions most asked to us by parents, so we recently introduced it into both the first and the second workshops as a specific topic.

In your case, since you live in Madrid, the most appropriate approach would be for the mother to always speak to your child in German (except during certain rituals such as bathing, story time before bed, which may be separated from other activities because the child
experiences these as "bath time" or "story time"), and you in one of your two languages.

Being in Spain, you could take advantage of the fact that your child will have much more input in Spanish, and speak to him from the start in French, and almost always in French. This way the association the child makes of, "one parent, one language" is not broken and he would be naturally exposed to three languages from the beginning.

Another option would be to speak to him in Spanish and take him to a French nursery school or primary school, or to hire a French-speaking nanny for a minimum of two hours a day before he starts school.
In either case, it’s important to always be attentive to strengthening the weaker language (since there will be three languages sharing communication time) by creating more learning experiences in order to prevent your child from being limited in one of the languages.

Exposure to three languages at once does not cause "confusion" of any kind, nor an intellectual development problem, provided that he’s given enough communication time in all three languages.
If you need a more complete and individualized response, we have specialists in our Speech Therapy division who evaluate bilingualism.
Also, in our workshops for parents on bilingualism, we provide useful and practical information on these issues (see WORKSHOPS section above).

Q: What should parents think about when raising a bilingual child?

A: The first and main point is to realise that bilingualism isn’t a question of all or nothing. Many linguists classify a child as bilingual if they understand to perfection the language that their mother or father speaks but only speaks it at a very basic level. The opportunity for a child to be exposed to the sounds of a language will enable him to speak the language without an accent; the passive knowledge will give him the ability to dominate the language in ways that others can only dream of.
Our responsibility as a parent doesn’t consist in making our child bilingual nor what level of mastering he has of each language; our responsibility is only to offer our child the opportunity to learn the languages. Success will depend on variables that we can’t control related to the linguistic aptitudes of our child, their motivation, challenges encountered in exposing our child to the language…

Q: What is a typical Bilingual Spanish family like and what difficulties do they face?

A: The main reason why many bilingual Spanish families are bringing up their kids in two languages is that they are mixed marriages, from different cultures and languages. In these cases, when designing a system of communication, two fundamental aspects need to be taken into account:

• Which is the minority language, and what difficulties are going to be encountered when exposing a child to this minority language in Spain.
• How well does the Spanish parent dominate the other language?