We always get asked if there’s a window of opportunity when it’s the ideal age to raise bilingual kids. There are actually several windows, or critical periods, for language learning when our brain is more adaptive to absorbing the new language(s), the broadest being from 0 to seven years of age, even before we learn to talk.
Bilingual Baby Project–a study presented by researchers of the University of Washington and the University of Texas at San Antonio–concluded that the earlier we start exposing babies to a second language, the more flexible their bilingual brains will be and the more they can identify and separate the sounds of the different languages they are exposed to.
The key, researchers say, is that during their first year of life, babies should be exposed through rich interactions to the two languages at home so their brains can absorb all the sounds and retain them by the time this first window starts to close once they turn one year old. In fact, “the researchers also show that the relative amount of each language — English and Spanish — babies were exposed to affected their vocabulary as toddlers.”
This study is significant because it is the first one to measure brain activity in the first year of age and relate it directly to language learning in babies exposed to both English and Spanish at home.
Knowing this, we give you three strategies parents raising bilingual babies can use as soon as their child is born {or even in the womb!}:
1. Habla, habla, habla! Researchers also found that exposure to the language does matter. Meaning, the more a baby hears the sounds of a particular language, the larger his vocabulary in it will be. Talk to your baby all the time in Spanish, or your second language, even if you think she has no idea what you are saying; she’s absorbing every little sound and it will be the building blocks to her own speech acquisition. Reading and singing in Spanish will also enrich their bilingual environment and get them used to hearing books and songs in Spanish.
You can also organize playdates with other Spanish-speaking amigas with babies so that your kids listen to the chatter in Spanish while you’re all entertained.
2. Have a plan, be consistent and stick to it. The personal strategies parents adopt to raise their child bilingually are fundamental to creating a rich and consistent environment to learn multiple languages. As a couple, decide early on which of the proven methods to raise a bilingual child you will use in your home: Minority Language at Home{ml@h}, One Parent, One Language {OPOL}, or Time and Place. Once you decide, have a game plan and stick to it to create familiarity and consistency in the baby’s environment. For example, if the dad will be the Spanish speaker, he will always be the Spanish speaker, sin excusas.
3. Commit to your decision. The study also showed that the parents’ desires to raise bilingual children is of utmost importance. Committing to the bilingual journey requires a real passion and desire to follow through. Be sure of what your reasons are and let that passion filter through your daily actions to ensure a fun and immersive bilingual home environment for your baby.
The research is clearly on our side, we really have no excuse to not promote bilingualism in our kids as soon as they are born. Just think about it, they have no idea of the gift you are giving them and of the incredible ways it will manifest as benefits in their lives, and, the best part is they can’t even complain or argue against it yet.
I do need to add that even though this Bilingual Baby Project finds that the first year of age is the best time to start learning a second language, this in no way means it’s our only window of opportunity. It is the first one and will set a solid base for a flexible brain, but children until the age of seven are clearly well suited, neurolagically speaking, to easily become fluently bi and multilingual.
Share: How early did you start exposing your child to a second language?
Excellent read, I am doing Spanish, English, and Japanese, wish me luck!
That´s fantastic! How are they getting each of the languages?
My daughter: when she was six months old (though she “heard” me teaching English in the womb), my son: from birth.
I still find it amazing that they live in a dominant Hungarian environment and I’m the only one in the family who speaks English to them, they still use English quite a lot, and it became a “language of play” for them, they use it with each other during play.
Excellent that it´s a language of play between them. We have found that oftentimes the second child is influenced when their older sibling speaks the majority language to them at home and during play. Getting the older child to speak the minority language, in your case English, to her brother is a great sign!
What a wonderful and relative post!
Habla, habla, habla ~~~ I can so relate! I used to talk to our youngest so much that my mom and my sister would tell me to stop talking to her so much and have some silence. I NEVER followed their advice and now Megan – at the age of 11 – is a great communicator who loves talking A LOT about important things in her native English and is still very intrigued by learning her 2nd language Spanish.
I started while she was in the womb – reading, singing, dancing, talking – with both English and Spanish. With my two eldest (boys from a Latino Dad) I really feel I dropped the ball with their bilingualism and refuse to let that happen with Megan.
Megan is lucky!!! I´m sure she must be as passionate as you about Spanish and languages in general.
Makes me feel better for speaking Spanish to my 11 month old even when others around me don’t understand.
Oh, Yazmin I really hope this continues to motivate you for sure! What others think shouldn´t be a factor at all in how we choose to raise our kids and, especially, when we are giving them the huge gift of bilingualism. Maybe you need to send them this article?
I spoke to my daughter in Spanish throughout infancy – I had heard somewhere that even if the infant isn’t learning the language per se, it made them neurologically more prepared for languages later in life.
My daughter decided early in toddlerhood that she did not like it when I spoke to her in Spanish. If she heard Spanish being spoken on Sesame Street, she walked over to turn the TV off. I still spoke to her in it – but much more sporadically. The public school she attended had a stupid rule preventing elementary and most middle school kids from taking a language class – unless singled out by a teacher as “worthy” to do so. Consequently, she didn’t get any formal language instruction until her last year in middle school when she was allowed to take a sampler course – one marking period each in Spanish, French and German. She did great – A’s in all three.
Now she’s studying Japanese. She loves it and again, is a straight A student. She listens to music in all sorts of languages – Russian, Norwegian, Greek and Italian are the ones I remember, but there are more. She still doesn’t speak Spanish, but she thinks some day she might study it. I’m resigned to not pushing her too much on this for fear of turning her off the language altogether.
But I’m convinced it’s the early infancy influx of more than one language that has given her an aptitude and openness to languages in general….
Thanks for sharing this story, Sabrina! I´m appalled about the school´s rule because I can´t find any reasons to justify not teaching kids a second language.
It sounds like you definitely planted the sounds of Spanish in her developing brain and that it has paid off.
My daughter went through the same thing — refusing Spanish. Still kind of does.
But, her accent is fabulous and she understands way more.
yay for you for sticking with it!…and no doubt that she did get a lot of good from what you did.
Excellent article! I used to teach pre-school and kindergarten (3-6 YO) at a small private Montessori school. Of the 30 or so kids in our room, 10-12 did not speak English as a first language. We had children from Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, China, India, Mexico, other Central and South American countries, other European countries. Our advice to parents, many of whom were learning English themselves, was to speak their mother language at home, while we used English at school (the school also had classes for babies and toddlers)–the children became fluent in both. In one case, the mom spoke French, the dad spoke Arabic at home, and we spoke English at school to a set of twins. The children were slightly slower to talk, but when they did, they spoke all three languages.
Those parents and kids were lucky to have found your school!
My girl goes to a Montessori preschool and there´s also a lot of different native languages spoken by the kids. She´s the only Spanish-speaker and they´ve always encouraged her bilingualism. She´s definitely flourished.
I guess I am always a little shocked that this has to be studied…Just go to Miami and listen to the Cuban-American kids who grew up with both languages…Yes, it works. Yes, earlier the better. No, no problem at school. We’re all genius, I am telling you. LOL
Gracias, Spanglish Baby!
Ja! Miami is the perfect case study! In fact, the oldest immersion school is in Miami..Coral Way Elementary.
It’s amazing to me, too. You would think at some point people in the school system administration would have noticed the HUGE chunk of the population of Houston who are bilingual — in all different languages. There’s no debate about whether being bilingual is overall a positive for the person. They’re all over the place, and it’s quite obvious. But this is not reflected in the schools. Here in Houston we don’t seem to have many options for dual-language or immersion in the schools; a handful for Spanish, 1 in French, none I’ve found in any other languages so far (public or private). I wonder if it’s simply that the parents have not demanded it.
For my first I spoke to her mostly in Spanish from birth. At one when she first started talking she was speaking mostly spanish. At two she was pretty evently bi-lingual but after two she started speaking a lot of English. She’s now speaking mostly English but very interested in learning more Spanish. In our home we speak both languages. Our youngest is 1. She doesn’t talk yet, but lots of people talk to her, whereas my first daughter was spoken to mostly by me. I’m not sure how she’ll speak but we’re adding a lot more spanish due to my oldest daughter’s interest now.
I wish I started early… I am still struggling con mi espanol and I called DF home for a while….
stay adventurous, Craig
I´m sure that´s exactly what will motivate you if you ever have kids!
Our son heard me speaking in both English and Spanish on a daily basis from within the womb. I have to say I’m not sure which influenced him more, because he heard English more of the time but the Spanish was usually louder LOL.
Seriously though, there loads of scientific studies making this point, but I will mention that I became acquainted through our church with a lady who teaches children’s classes in Mandarin at the local Chineses Community Center who told me children who were adopted from China by American parents and came here when they were 2 or 3 years old (heard solely Mandarin up until then but have not heard it since) have a relatively easy time in her classes at age 5 or 6, similar to children who have always been here with Chinese parents if they speak both Mandarin and English at home.
Of course Spanish was louder!
Interesting about the Mandarin classes..it totally makes sense to me! Incredible how our brain just retains it all.
I think the brain retains a lot but I also think there is actually a “window” too. My father says he remembers that he understood German completely when he was little, but he went to kindergarten in 1945, where the kids were smacked with a ruler if the teacher heard them speaking any German, and his parents & older siblings stopped letting the younger kids hear them speaking in German at home, around the same time. Nowadays when he travels in Germany he’s told he has a totally perfect accent when he speaks the few words he’s learned (as an adult, with difficulty) — although he doesn’t understand what anybody is saying, really. So, it seems to be there in his brain somewhere, but he didn’t have really any more exposure to German during the rest of his childhood, and I think that’s why, for all practical purposes it’s lost.
I’ve met a lot of people as teenagers or adults whose parents spoke another language but the kids got into all English either by accident or on purpose, and I’ve never talked with anybody who was glad it was done that way. I think there is always a sense of loss. I even feel this as the next generation after it was lost. I really encourage anybody who has the ability to teach their kids a minority language, do it, keep doing it, don’t give up, do it as much as you can.
We started the OPOL method with our son while I was pregnant. Now, he is fully bilingual French / English. More FR than EN actually, he recently “discovered” that Daddy understands French too, so he is resisting speaking English at home! It’s just a phase – I hope!
Oh, the discovery phase! It´s tricky now that he gets it, but Dad can now try to make English their own special thing.
Is English or French the majority language where you live?
We started from birth for my son really, although because my husband was used to speaking English with me at home it probably took him a little while to get used to speaking only Russian again. My MiL stayed a lot with us in the first year and she speaks only Russian, and my vocabulary in Russian improved a lot as well, as long as we are on the topic of babies. He’s about equal in both languages although I think he might be a bit delayed in both. He’s three.
My daughter has the benefit that we are all much more used to being a fully bilingual family now. It’ll be interesting to see if her language skills progress any differently to my son’s.
How great that both you and your husband were on board to make this happen for your kids. Congratulations!
I too have barraged my children with French (my second language) since birth, and I agree completely that this is the best approach if we want them to grow up bilingually. However, I will also confess that it has not always been easy for me, in two respects: a natural introvert, it took weeks (months?) before speaking constantly to a baby felt natural; and as a non-native speaker, I had to learn lots of new words and get comfortable with my own imperfections in the language.
Over 3.5 years later, though, my son understands English and French equally well!
Success stories are always the best. We know the struggles are real and we have to be honest and admit that it isn´t easy, especially when you´re a non-native speaker,but you are proof that it can be done!
My daughter was exposed to both languages I believe since conception. We live in S. America and her father speaks Spanish and I speak both. I have always spoke to her in English. Now, she is 3 and she goes back and forth when I talk to here, but in her nursery school I believe she is speaking more Spanish. They begin to introduce English in Pre-kinder. It is interesting especially when we travel state side and are around my family how she picks up and begins to speak more English. I studied Bil. ED and I want all my children to be multilingual. Its amazing because as I consider returning stateside my first concern is finding a school that has dual language or a developmental bilingual program.
Since my son was born I spoke as much Spanish as I could to him. Only using English when I didn’t know the Spanish word– then I’d wait and ask his dad or some friends what the word was and refer back to it.
We have spoken Spanish at home, English outside the home since birth for our kids. Our 2 sons joined our family (from China and Ethiopia) when they were 3.5 and 3, and against everyone’s advice we began with both languages at once with huge success. Our older 2 are in Mandarin classes on Saturdays, and they are not really progressing. We are hoping that at least they are tuning their ears and maybe later it will help them pick it up faster. It’s hard bc neither of us speak Mandarin and so helping with homework is *very* hard.
So nice to see many experiences, many different backgrounds, many stories but love is common to us all. I am dealing with many international couples and the knowledge behind bilingual babies is getting stronger and stronger.
Tony
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