Reluctantly Bilingual, Or Stubbornly Monolingual?

Either way, that's S, in a nutshell.

She understands pretty much everything in German, though from context at times. She isn't too shy to ask to have a word or phrase translated into English, if her German vocabulary is not sufficient. If left to her own devices, she generally speaks English - though in cases when she only knows the German word for something, she doesn't hesitate to use it.

Now that I'm frequently asking her to please speak German whenever possible and appropriate, she's trying to sort out what to do. Depending on the mood of the day, she goes from trying quite willingly and having fun with it, to ignoring my requests or flat out refusing to speak German at all.

It is not really surprising that she mainly speaks English, I think. We live in an English-speaking environment and even though I mainly speak German to her, English far outweighs German in her life. This way, we've gone from a baby and toddler that babbled both languages interchangeably to a pre-schooler who's become pretty set in her (English) ways. I blame myself for this, since I rarely asked her to speak German with me and/or O and we somehow got used to having these weird conversations where I speak German and she speaks English. For example:

"Es ist schon spät. Bald geht's ins Bett, okay?"
[It's late already. Soon it's time for bed, okay?]

"I don't want to go to bed! How come I always have to go to bed????"

"Wir müssen morgen früh aufstehen, deswegen. Fünf Minuten hast Du noch, und dann gehen wir hoch."
[We have to get up early tomorrow, that's why. Five minutes and then we're going upstairs.]

"I don't want to!!!"

And so on and so forth.

I've always assumed that our kids would just simply pick up German because they hear me speak it to them most of the time. It finally clicked that this does not appear to be working - at least not to the point of her actually speaking German. I'm hoping that the new strategy will turn things around and she will begin to feel more comfortable speaking it after all. I'm reading up on the topic now, and it seems that we're on the right track. From the sounds of it, her lack of enthusiasm is entirely normal. For now, we're just going to keep this up and see where it'll take us.

On the whole, she's able to understand most things said to her in German, and if she really needs to, she can get her point across in that language as well. The Husband and I would like her to also be able to speak German more fluently than she does, or at least use what she knows more regularly and without so much prodding, but this will hopefully come as she gets used to our new strategy.