ABSTRACT
This chapter is short and written primarily for health professionals (doctors, nurses, midwives, speech and language therapists, dentists etc.) who come into contact with young children and their families, and those currently preparing to become such health professionals. Its aim is twofold. Firstly, it aims to give health professionals some understanding of the way children growing up with two languages develop their languages and the importance of the family languages for children and their families. In particular, the monolingual norm and its consequences for the assessment of child language development are discussed. The hope is that this understanding will allow health professionals to support parents to speak their first or strongest language to their children and to ensure that they give their children a language environment that is as rich as possible. The second aim of this chapter (and the associated web material) is to give parents material to put in the hands of the health professionals they meet.
