Raising Bilingual Kids

A challenging yet rewarding endeavor

Trying to raise a child bilingually in a monolingual culture may offer more challenges than rewards during your child’s youth, but experts recommend sticking to your resolve and your child will thank you as an adult.

The best tool for giving your child a strong bilingual foundation is for at least one parent to speak only in Spanish to the child from birth, experts say.

Children are not motivated to learn languages in the same way adults are. Adults may learn a language because they want to travel to another country or get a better job. By contrast, basic necessities and social interaction motive children to learn languages. If they can only go to the park or use the potty by asking Mommy in Spanish, then they will use Spanish to communicate, experts say.

Of course, the parent must speak Spanish proficiently for this strategy to work. When it comes to linguistics, a parent’s primary job is to explain the world to a child in terms of concepts, such as colors, shapes, numbers and letters. A child uses these explanations to build later knowledge on. If a language deficiency inhibits a parent from explaining these concepts clearly, the child’s linguistic and cognitive progress can suffer, says Michael Guerrero, an assistant professor of bilingual education at the University of Texas in Austin.

“If you don’t speak to your child in the language you speak best, you don’t model an adult level of proficiency and you withhold knowledge about the world around the child,” says Guerrero, who married a Mexi co City native and is raising two bilingual daughters. “You need to give your child the best native language foundation you can so when they start school they have an appropriate level of language proficiency.”

Liliana Valenzuela, a bilingual translator and mother of two bilingual children, expressed the same sentiment in another way. “You must mother in the language you were mothered,” says Valenzuela, a Mexico City native who lives in Austin, TX.

Even if you speak perfect Spanish to your child from birth, the influences of a monolingual culture are at work. Your child may speak Spanish beautifully at home until she attends school. Then, social pressure from Englishspeaking peers sets in and the child may rebel against speaking Spanish, experts say.

This has happened to the most-determined of parents. Guerrero’s ten-year-old daughter told her mother to stop speaking Spanish to her when she started school at age four.

Valenzuela’s five-year-old son had trouble understanding English when he started school a year ago. This year, he thinks Spanish is stupid and he refuses to speak Spanish to his Spanish-speaking baby-sitter.

A school-age child’s refusal to speak Spanish also can discourage younger children from speaking Spanish. In fact, English-speaking influences from peers and the media are so strong in this country that experts recommend both parents speak Spanish to their children, if both parents are fluent. If a child insists on speaking English, experts recommend repeating whatever the child says in Spanish.

Other strategies include enrolling the child in a bilingual school, hiring a Spanishspeaking baby sitter, or starting a Spanish-speaking play group so the child will socialize with Spanish-speaking peers. Valenzuela started a Spanish-speaking play group that has been meeting weekly for nearly ten years. Immersing the child in the language is also beneficial. Experts recommend sending the child to stay with Spanish-speaking relatives in this country and other countries.

“The best thing for us is spending time in Mexico with family,” Valenzuela says. “When we’re there, they are speaking Spanish from morning until night and they don’t even notice it.”

Games, songs and stories, television shows, and movies also help reinforce the Spanish language and culture. If you aren’t proficient in Spanish, these tools can help you introduce the language to your child and improve her chances of learning the language later in life, said Gloria G. Rodriguez, founder of Avance Inc., a parenting program primarily for Hispanics in San Antonio.

Rodriguez is the mother of three bilingual children and the author of the book, Raising Nuestros Ninos, which includes advice about raising children to be bilingual. Rodriguez recommends playing music in Spanish to children from birth. Children are born with the capacity to understand all sounds, but if they are not exposed to the sounds within six months of birth, they lose their ear for the sounds, Rodriguez said.

“Even if you can’t speak entirely in Spanish to your child, any amount of exposure to the language is laying a foundation,” Rodriguez says. “You are giving them an ear for the language, a way of thinking, an understanding of who they are to build on later in life. They will be able to start from where you left off and run with their knowledge. It may not happen until college, but when it happens, your child will thank you.”



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