This is not as unusual as it sounds. There are many examples of a parent learning a language from the other parent alongside their first-born or second-born child. For example, a father may pick up a minority language spoken by the mother while listening to the mother speaking to the child. The father will be able to understand many minority language conversations in the family. At the same time, he may continue to speak in the majority language. In this example, the father may find it artificial and unnatural to speak to the child in anything except his first language.

In other cases, a parent will attend a language learning class as soon as a child is born, keeping a few months ahead of the child. One aim is to establish some kind of language uniformity inside the house so that all the occupants are speaking the same language to each other, or at least, understand each other speaking. In a minority language situation, particularly where that minority language is not strong in the local community, there is value in this. The child will later become bilingual outside the home.

One danger is where language uniformity exists in the home that parallels the same language uniformity in the community. For example, in-migrant parents decide to lose their heritage language and speak the language of the host country instead. In such cases, the chance of bilingualism will be lost and monolingualism may result.