If there's a second language in your family and it isn't being passed on, there's a window on it, and it's shorter than people assume.
This is one of the few genuinely dated constraints in language learning, so it's worth stating plainly rather than emotively.
The Window Is Real and It's Early
Children acquire a language effortlessly and to native standard when they get enough exposure early. That capacity doesn't disappear, but it does decline — and the version available at four isn't the version available at fourteen.
After that point it becomes a subject they study rather than a language they have. Still worth doing, but a different thing: considerably more work, for a worse result.
Unlike most timing arguments in language learning, this one has an actual clock attached, and it isn't yours.
Why Household Exposure Usually Fails
The common plan is that the parent who speaks it will use it at home. In practice this rarely survives.
It requires sustained effort against the path of least resistance, in a household where the other parent doesn't follow, and it tends to collapse into the majority language within a year or two. Not through lack of intent. Through friction.
What predicts success is whether the language is present in the household environment rather than dependent on one person's discipline. Something ambient. Something that's on in the car.
Where You Come Into It
A child won't sustain interest in something the adults treat as homework. They will absolutely sustain interest in something that's playing, that a parent is also doing, and that they can beat you at.
Which is the practical route — not you teaching them, but the material being present and both of you being in it. Children pick up songs faster than adults and enjoy being better than a parent at something, and that dynamic does more work than any amount of instruction.
The Plain Version
The window is open now and it closes gradually. Nothing dramatic happens on any particular birthday — the cost of the same effort simply rises each year while the ceiling on the result comes down.
It's the one part of this where waiting has a measurable price attached.
About Outputly
Outputly plays out loud in the house and the car, so it's ambient rather than instructional. Children pick the choruses up quickly, which tends to be the thing that keeps everybody going.