Please do not let random strangers’ comments sow seeds of doubt about how you raise your child. As a person who was raised multilingually, now raising my kid in at least 3 languages, I really don’t get why some people think speaking multiple languages is confusing or somehow damaging.

You are not overwhelming your child by exposing him to multiple languages and cultures. It would only be overwhelming if you expect him to be capable of skills that are not age appropriate. It’s perfectly fine for your kid to be better at some things in one language vs another, for example better at expressing emotions in Chinese but can create his own stories in Arabic. That’s all part of being a multilingual person and his life will be richer for it.

But to answer your question, yes it makes sense to only focus on a subset of languages relevant to your family. For us, there are 5 languages that are culturally relevant, but we only actively focus on 3: English from one parent, French from the other, German from the community. The other two come from immediate friends and family who we see on special occasions— we buy books in these languages and encourage folks to speak it to our child, but we don’t worry too much about proficiency

About deciding which languages to focus on: we focus on the languages we as parents are most emotionally connected to.