But although she has supportive friends and family, Ms Maxwell has had to explain her priority to strangers who take issue with it. She is a lecturer at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi and is planning to research how te reo can be normalised.
"I thought about how society judges te reo Maori and why is it such an issue. Why is it frowned upon? Why is it not okay to raise a child in te reo Maori, like we're setting them up for failure?"
The wider Maxwell family has varying levels of competency in te reo Maori, and has instituted its own language plan. They meet once a week for dinner, and during it speak only in te reo.
"It's very elementary and it's hard sometimes - we'll have big long silences and people are sitting there going 'uuummm'. They're trying to find how to communicate. Normalising language within our whanau is a start."
Still, she realises the difficulties some kura kaupapa graduates have faced in practical situations where there are requirements for English. It's an issue for which she doesn't have any easy answers. Mr Milne says it's inevitable his daughter will pick up English as it surrounds her outside the house. He's more strident than his partner about using only te reo.
But there are challenges. "Both Kahu's whanau and mine are raised in the Maori world and know Maori things, but they'll speak to Atareta in English.
"There's a fine line; you don't want to tell your whanau, 'Ah, actually we don't want you to speak English'. We don't want to make them feel stink."
