One of our main goals when launching SpanglishBaby a year ago was to create the kind of community where parents raising bilingual kids could come and get useful and relevant information. Although we sometimes think we might have the answers to everything, as Ana Lilian likes to point out, motherhood has humbled us and now we know we don’t. Enter our most popular category: Ask an Expert.
We always envisioned having a panel with respected and trusted experts from various backgrounds related to bilingualism and we’re happy to announce that this is exactly what Ask an Expert has become. We currently count with the expertise of eight amazing professionals who take turns answering one of your questions every Wednesday. We feel honored and grateful to have such a distinguished panel, but we’d like to take a moment here to thank two of them in particular who believed in us and supported our vision even before we got started.
Our very first panelist was Simona Montanari, and Italian mom of two trilingual girls and an early multilingual development expert at California State University in Los Angeles. Ana Lilian first met her when she attended one of the popular seminars she hosts in LA for parents raising bilinguals. She immediately knew Simona’s personal and professional expertise in bilingualism and her ease in relating with parents would make her an ideal expert for the panel. In fact, she helped us launch this site by writing the very first Ask an Expert.
Author and bilingualism researcher Barbara Zurer Pearson was the second expert who agreed to come on board without hesitation. Reading her insightful book, Raising a Bilingual Child, was one of the first things both Ana Lilian and I did in the initial stages of SpanglishBaby. It was our bible. I still remember writing Barbara an email explaining what we were doing and telling her we’d be honored if she’d agreed to join us as one of our experts. Getting her positive response remains as one of the most memorable highlights from those early days.
A special MUCHAS GRACIAS goes out to both Simona and Barbara for believing in us way before anybody else.
If you’re new here or you don’t really know exactly how our Ask an Expert category works, it’s pretty simple. If you have a doubt about anything related to raising bilingual and bicultural children, all you have to do is submit your question here. We’ll try to match it to the expert who best fits your needs. Every week we post one of question with a practical answer you can implement in your daily life. Just remember: no question is too big or too simple. If you have a doubt, most likely it’s shared by all.
And, now, just so you get a taste for what we’re talking about, here’s a sample of some of the most popular questions we’ve received in the last year:
- Should I do Something about my Son’s Grammar Mistakes?
- How do I Continue to Reinforce Exposure to Spanish?
- Does my Son Have a Speech Delay Because he is Bilingual?
- How Do you Raise a Child from an English Speaking Home to Speak Spanish?
- When Should my Child Learn to Read in a Second Language?
- What Should I do if my Child Mixes Languages?
I know some of this will surely resonate with you, but this is only a small sample. If you’d like to read more answers to some of the burning questions we all have about raising bilingual kids, go here.
Oh, and don’t forget about our daily giveaways in the SpanglishBabyFinds section in celebration of our first year! We’re having a different one every day this week and you can still enter all of the ones we’ve posted so far!
What do you think of our experts? We’d love to read your thoughts.
Sometimes people with collections of little letters after their names say things that make me feel doubts of the right approach with our bilingual baby. I love the reassurance from Ask an Expert!