If you want to gift your children with an extra language, the real benefit is unlocking a part of the world and its culture for them.

Esperanto in this case is less of a gift to the child, and more of a self-expression of the parents’ worldview.

The author kind of acknowledges something about this.

> In Canada, it would make a lot more sense to raise the kids speaking French. If I had been more organized and forward-thinking, I could have raised them as native French speakers. I would have needed to prepare and study French but that didn’t even occur to me when Mira was born. I was fluent in English and Esperanto, I wanted Mira to be bilingual, and so I taught her Esperanto.

I don’t buy this argument. It boils down to, yes it would have been better to teach a different language, but the parent didn’t want to do the work of learning French, so the child got something that wasn’t nearly as beneficial instead. Children are capable of acquiring a second language for quite a bit longer than it takes a committed adult to become fluent in French.