The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents

I read this book almost 20 years ago, and I found it very instructive. At that time, I could only find scholarly and theoretical treatments of bilingualism. This descriptive approach was very reassuring for my wife (French) and me (American), since most other books tended to prescribe certain behaviors, or just put forth vague theoretical concepts. If nothing else, we took away from this book the notion that there is no "right way" to approach raising bilingual children. This book, through its various case studies, drove home the idea that each family must adapt to their individual conditions, and do what works, inevitably adjusting along the way. Now, both my children are fluent in both French and English, in addition to also being bicultural, so we're happy with the path it set us on as parents. I also lent this book to many friends with bilingual concerns over the years, and they always had positive reactions.

I bought this book trying to find some guidance regarding raising a bilingual kid. I was very pleased with the contents of the book and the way information is presented.

Being a bilingual myself, I also enjoy a lot of anecdotes about the "complications" when using my weaker language.

I highly recommend this book.

I was disappointed with this book. It presents general overview of linguistics and language development that one can find in multiple other sources. There is no practical advise on raising children bilingually. Case studies illustrating possible scenarios are for the most part inapplicable and lack detail to be useful in practice. There are very few books that should go straight into recycling bin - and this is one of them.

Limited use. I wanted a book to help me with how to approach bylinguilism but this book was just theory.

This book start with an intro to baby's development of language, then talks about the different types of bilinguals. And this is followed by different approach to bilinguism.
I think this book goes deep enough into the subject to make good decisions with what you want to do to approach this as a parent.