Daily Blog

When one of my daughter’s first words was D-d-d-dora I knew there was something special about this character. As a new mamá, I am watching children’s programs for the first time, getting to know what they are about and trying to figure out which are best for my daughter, Little L. Although she just turned 1, I do rely on some TV to help me with raising her bilingual. Little L’s exposure to Spanish is limited, and as I amRead More ...

  Passing on cultural traditions (both Mexican and US) to our children is extremely important to my husband and I: language, food, celebrations and religion are four significant areas that we try to integrate into our lives. Not only does it help them identify with both the English and Spanish communities, but these daily and special occasions strengthen the bond we have within our family, instill pride in their heritage and increase their language competence. When my husband was growingRead More ...

An article published earlier this week in The New York Times titled “For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing” has created a flurry of commentary about the dire need for more children’s books with which our Latino kids can identify. In other words, more children’s books with characters that look like them and with storylines that speak to them. While I would love nothing more than to see all Latino authors been given the opportunity to be published, I’m having aRead More ...

My family and I arrived in Cancun last night to attend a good friend’s wedding in Playa del Carmen. We used to live in Playa – as it’s fondly known – in 2005 when hurricane Wilma destroyed Cancun. The year my husband and I spent here has been the most magical in our lives and the friendships we made still remain strong. My husband’s sister and her family live here as well, so we’ll take any excuse to come downRead More ...

When Aidan (my now 4.5 year old) was 3 years old, he decided that he was going to refuse to do anything “Chinese”. He used to lower his head and shove his hands deep into his pockets when asked to speak Chinese. He one day declared that he didn’t want to speak Chinese anymore. My son decided Chinese wasn’t cool, or hip, or relevant to anything he was interested in. Everything fun was in English, his Chinese friends all spoke EnglishRead More ...

Can you believe Christmas is less than three weeks away? I can’t — especially because I haven’t done ANY shopping at all. ¡Auxilio! If you’re anything like me, then you’ll like what I’m about to tell you… For a couple of years now, we’ve been wanting to put together a gift guide and I’m happy to announce we’ve finally done it! The thing with our Ultimate Gift Guide for Bilingual Kids is that it’s really not only to get gift givingRead More ...

I thought I knew *a lot* about dual immersion schools because I’ve been researching them for both the blog and our book for almost four years now, but now that my daughter has been in one for almost four months I have a whole new understanding of them. I know the topic of bilingual education as a whole is so confusing for parents because there are so many different programs (ELL, ESL, full immersion, partial immersion, etc) and because, dependingRead More ...

When I watched Ana and Roxana’s interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision last week, I was struck by an irony. Roxana spoke about the fact that the Latino community used to be all for assimilation, thus interested in teaching their kids to be as American as possible, which meant speaking English only (or at least more than Spanish). As evidenced by the growing numbers of SpanglishBaby supporters and the flurry of national conversation about bilingualism, this attitude is changing. TheRead More ...