Editor’s note: We’re spending this week celebrating dads raising bilingual kids with guest posts written by them in honor of Father’s Day. We love having the dad’s perspective and hope this series encourages other papis to share their stories with us.

On November 11, 2009, I was just another young man trying to make his way in the world. Some of us college-aged kids from church were starting a small group, and we were kicking it off with a little get together at one of the leader’s house. His wife is from Ecuador. They spoke Spanish, and I thought it was great, but didn’t give it much thought. I had studied Spanish in high school and a few years in college, however the years since had put quite a layer of rust on my not-so-great-to-begin-with skills. That night, I wished I had paid more attention in Spanish class.

When she walked in, I knew it right away. She was beautiful, different, unique and full of life. The only problem was… she spoke Spanish. Not English. She was in the U.S. visiting family and studying English. She had not quite mastered it yet.

We tried to chit-chat but it was horrendous. I knew enough Spanish to attempt to speak it, but she couldn’t understand a word I said due to my accent. We exchanged Facebook info and I tried to give her directions home. I was pretty proud when she took off going the right way. Months later she would admit to me she had absolutely no idea what I had said. I guess my pointing was the most effective communication that night. The rest, as they say, is history.

From day one, after meeting her, I spent a huge amount of time and energy learning Spanish. I knew this relationship was going somewhere, and when it did, there would inevitably be kids. I knew I would want to be able to pass on to them their mother’s language and culture. Sort of. Ok, I wish I had that kind of insight. It wasn’t quite like that. The majority of the motivation at the beginning, if I’m being honest, was to be able to communicate with the mother of my future children. That was step one. The subsequent steps perhaps transpired a bit more like I described earlier.

As I learned more Spanish, and learned more about my future wife, I fell more and more in love with the language, the culture, and the satisfaction it brought to connect with her on that level. We have a lot of friends where one spouse speaks the minority language and the other spouse doesn’t; they use English as a medium of communication. There is nothing wrong with that, but I personally believe in Nelson Mandela’s famous saying:

“Speak to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. Speak to a man in his language, that goes to his heart.”

I wanted to speak to my wife’s heart and to be able to understand her and my son when they have those moments. Therefore, Spanish learning was high-priority (and still is… you never really LEARN a language). Fast forward three and a half years later and we currently live in the heartland of the U.S., Illinois, and are raising our 11-month-old child, Liam, bilingual. There was never a question as to whether or not we were going to raise him bilingual, only a question of how. He was going to be bilingual regardless. We chose the mL@H method.

Learning Spanish, and interacting with Mexican culture, has literally changed my life. I can’t even fathom not teaching my son Spanish. I’m jealous of him! He’s going to be a true bilingual from birth and have what neither his mom nor I did. We both learned our languages as adults and scratched, clawed and fought our way to fluency. Spanish is now basically second nature to me, but it’s still not quite like English. I don’t like that. I wish it were, but it isn’t. It will be, or at least it can be, for him.

I can’t wait to open his eyes to all the wonders that are out there. To be able to give him, at a young age, a broader perspective on everything from different words to different worlds. He won’t be that 20-something who knows nothing about life. We’re going to travel, learn and raise him in a culturally and linguistically diverse way so he has the keys to unlock his heritage on both sides.

Passing a language down to your child is, in my opinion, an incredibly important part of being a parent. Especially when one of the parents identifies so much with that culture and language. My wife lived in Mexico for 29 years. Mexico will live in her, and in our family, forever. It will take more than a generation to remove us from it, if ever. We will hopefully instill in our son the importance of his culture, his people and his heritage. That is one of the most satisfying and rewarding things I will be able to do as a father; celebrate our family where it is, where it comes from, and where it is going. The challenge will be in making our son understand where he fits in both cultures. A running joke in our house is “allí se va.” We use it, loosely translated, as something like “here goes nothing!” That basically says it all.

Allí se va.

{Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Nelson}

Jeffrey Nelson blogs about being bilingual, raising bilingual children, and all things bilingual at Living Bilingual.com . He and his wife, Gyovanna, are currently raising their 11-month old child, Liam, as a bilingual in English/Spanish. Jeff loves the fact that his son will grow up bilingual and bicultural, a long way removed from his own past growing up in North Dakota; the antithesis of the bicultural childhood.

Editor’s note: We’re spending this week celebrating dads raising bilingual kids with guest posts written by them in honor of Father’s Day. We love having the dad’s perspective and hope this series encourages other papis to share their stories with us.

I first fell in love with Argentine asado several years ago on a magical New Year’s Eve in Mar del Plata, Argentina. It was my first trip to South America and I was meeting my wife’s large, extended family for the first time. We had caravanned together from Buenos Aires and decided to have a traditional Argentine barbecue at the family’s beach house before heading out on the town to celebrate the new year. What transpired was an unforgettable moment of falling in love with a new culture—its food, its wine, its cooking traditions, and its whole-hearted embrace of familia.

An Argentine asado is a lengthy barbecue, more akin to a fiesta, where family and friends gather for hours on end to eat, drink, talk, laugh, and generally live life at a languid pace unrecognizable by our fast-tempoed, modern society. I was so enchanted by the asado experience that I became an asador and promised to share my passion with the rest of the world.  So, I started Gaucho Garcia, an English-language resource dedicated to South American grilling.

When our daughter, Luna, was born last August, my wife and I knew two things: one, we were dedicated to raising her bilingual and teaching her about her family’s Spanish-speaking roots (I am of Spanish descent and she is Argentine). And two, we committed to educating her about everything related to Argentine cuisine. What better way to raise a bilingual child than to speak Spanish while teaching her the culinary traditions of her family?

In addition, since we were both fluent, we felt that raising Luna bilingual was one of the best gifts we could give her in this life. With so many primos in Buenos Aires and Madrid that we hoped to visit in the years to come, instilling Spanish at an early age seemed imperative so that she could communicate with her family during our travels. In fact, she will embark on her first international adventure to Buenos Aires this September for her cousin’s wedding.

For now, Luna is still just babbling and has only one tooth—not nearly enough to make it through the large portions of bife de lomo that I normally serve at my asados. In no time, however, she will be assisting her Papi with the preparation of la parrilla and helping her Mami in the kitchen with the family’s recipe for empanadas argentinas. And when she comes running to me one day, grinning from ear to ear, and says, “Papi, mira lo que hice en la cocina con Mamita!”, I will know that the commitment we made the day she was born has paid off… and we just might have that fateful New Year’s asado to thank for it all.

Gabriel García is an attorney and an asador living in the Silicon Valley hamlet of Morgan Hill, California. In 2007, he fell in love with South American barbecue after partaking in his first asado with his wife’s family in Argentina. Since then, he began blogging about asados and Argentine cuisine on his website Gaucho Garcia. He is father to a 9-month old baby girl, Luna, who he hopes will one day carry on the recipe for his world-famous chimichurri.

Editor’s note: For a long time now, we’ve been hoping to bring the dad perspective to raising bilingual children. While we were in Miami in September for our Bilingual is Better book launch, we met Ryan Pontier, the author of the guest post below. We were immediately impressed by his commitment to bilingualism — particularly because Spanish is not his native tongue. Ryan, however, hasn’t allowed that to stop him in his journey to raise his baby girl Anna bilingual. ¡Bravo!

I love to take my daughter grocery shopping with me because I find it to be an excellent opportunity to use language. I tell her what aisle we’re on, where we’re headed, and how I plan on using each of the ingredients we are searching for in a future recipe. As I approached the cashier last week, I made sure to carefully place each of the items in my cart on the conveyor belt, briefly discussing each one in an effort to narrate the experience for my 8-month-old daughter Anna. “Éstas son las zanahorias — largas, de color naranja y crujientes. Luego ésta es la espinaca. Es verde, es una hoja y la usamos en la ensalada.” The charade continued this way until I had neatly ordered all of the groceries while simultaneously balancing Anna in the Baby Bjorn. Because I noticed that the two women in line in front of me were engaged in a conversation in Spanish with the cashier — and because I am the Spanish language model with Anna —I greeted her informally in Spanish. She glanced quickly at me and proceeded to respond to me in English. This situation is one that I experience at least twice weekly here in Miami.

I love Miami for its culture and its languages, but I feel that I constantly have to prove to others that I speak Spanish. Although I may not seem it at first glance, I am, in fact, a fluent Spanish speaker. I am a white male who grew up in a rural, monolingual English town, but Spanish became my second language and my passion as soon as I was allowed to take a foreign language in seventh grade. My interest grew until college, when I had the opportunity to study in Madrid, Spain for an entire academic year and live with a host family. After graduating, I moved to the Texas-Mexico border and taught reading and language arts in Spanish at a bilingual elementary school. Two years later, I moved to Miami to be closer to my [now] wife. We have been here together for six years, and we are proud to be raising our daughter here.

My wife and I have decided to use the one-parent/one-language (OPOL) approach to raise our daughter bilingually. This means that I am the Spanish language model. As such, I am responsible for providing her with rich and varied language experiences that invite and allow her to hear and practice using Spanish, my second language. This is a daunting task at times since I am the only Spanish speaker on both sides of my family. Also, because I use English for social and academic purposes, I am admittedly more proficient in English. Luckily, my neighbors are friendly, I have great dictionaries, the internet is a pure blessing, and I know I can simply use an English word or phrase as a placeholder until I learn to say what I need to in Spanish. I am always learning, and it has yet to be too stressful, because I know that I am giving my daughter a gift by raising her bilingually.

So, after glossing over the conventional pleasantries of interacting with the cashier, I enjoy making a comment about the weather, the amount of people in the store, or something about Anna to show that my Spanish abilities go beyond the few stock phrases that most of us learned in Spanish class in middle and high school. This way, I demonstrate the value of Spanish for Anna, provide her another context in which to hear (and eventually use) Spanish, and self-indulgently prove to the world that I am a proud and capable Spanish speaker.

{photograph courtesy of Ryan Pontier}

Ryan W. Pontier is the proud papi of a curious and babblingly loquacious 8-month old bilingual daughter. He grew up in Central New Jersey as an English speaker and excitedly learned Spanish as a second language after years of classroom foreign language study and a life-changing year in Madrid, Spain. A former bilingual elementary school teacher, Ryan is currently a Ph.D. student studying language and literacy learning in multilingual settings.

There is one thing I have noticed about SpanglishBaby’s (and other parenting blogs’) readership that I don’t like: very few fathers are represented! This is nothing new; moms have historically been the ones attending playdates and talking about the trends in diaper bags. Still, fatherhood has changed considerably and, when it comes to maintaining a home culture and language, the presence of Papi is just as important as that of Mami.

Since my significant other is one of the most admirable fathers I have ever known, I decided to ask him a few questions about how he feels about his role in our multicultural family. Christian is father to two beautiful preteen girls and stepfather to my 4-year-old son.

Why did you decide to raise your kids to be bilingual, and how committed are you to this decision?

Spanish has been an important factor in my life, connecting me to friends and family members I wouldn’t have otherwise known. I am very committed to giving this same advantage and cultural pride to my children. Even though we speak lots of English at home because of homework and daily rituals, I still believe that Spanish is their first language and I never cease to emphasize that. 

Who reinforces Spanish the most for your kids?

My parents have been instrumental in keeping up Spanish at home, because they are not comfortable speaking English. From a young age, my daughters became accustomed to speaking only Spanish with their abuelos and it reassures me every time I hear it that they are part of the Spanish-speaking world that I call my own. 

Do fathers and mothers play different roles in giving kids bilingual skills?

Fathers should be just as involved as mothers in all aspects of parenting, but especially in maintaining a native heritage and language. Children of both genders look up to fathers differently, and I feel that if I portray a genuine interest in and respect for Spanish, they will emulate that.

What do you wish you had done differently throughout the years regarding Spanish and your children?

I would have spoken more Spanish at home with their mother, but more importantly, I would have spent TIME reading, writing, and discussing life in my native language. As second-generation Americans, my kids are more likely to lose the drive to speak Spanish, and I should have been more conscious of this when they were very young.

What is the best way for fathers to approach school-aged children who are resistant to speaking Spanish?

Consistency is key. It must be an expectation, along with chores and manners, but also must come from a genuine place. Children can feel when we aren’t being true to our own values. Since they do as we do, not as we say, we must also force ourselves to use Spanish every chance we get, or we will lose a bit of that sincerity and our kids will follow suit.

When was the last time you asked your father, brother, uncle, boyfriend, or husband about his commitment to raising truly bilingual kids?

Let’s make a concerted effort to open the conversation to the male voices, and remember that they are more than just backup.

The author with his family {Photo credit: Mario Iván Oña}

Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final essay in a week long series for Father’s Day written by papás who are raising bilingual and bicultural children. We hope you’ve enjoyed all of the essays this week. If you missed anything, you can always go to the introductory post for links to the essays and to our awesome giveaway!

Long before our daughter Aylin Carolina was born last October, my wife Deniz and I decided what she wasn’t going to be when she grew up: monolingual. With three languages between us, we knew giving her a chance at being trilingual was the greatest inheritance we could offer her. Not only would this inheritance be impervious to inflation or Wall Street shenanigans, it would also be the sturdiest bridge to her roots.

We certainly realize we’re wide-eyed new parents, who are only eight months into an 18-year race. And never mind that Aylin has yet to turn indecipherable ga-ga goo-goos into coherent words… in any language. Even so, we feel good about our chances. Confident. Perhaps, it’s because we have a few key things going for us.

For starters, Deniz and I are kindred spirits when it comes to having a strong sense of our cultural identity.  It’s true that in some ways, we couldn’t be more different. She’s Muslim; I was raised Catholic. She’s of Turkish descent; I’m of Ecuadorian. Her native language is Turkish, mine’s Spanish.  Despite our differences, we’re bonded by how much our cultures mean to us. And by being likeminded on something so deeply rooted, we support each other without hesitation. I know, for instance, that I can count on Deniz eventually supporting me and even helping me teach Aylin to dance a San Juanito (folkoric Ecuadorian dance), and Deniz can rest assured she’ll have an ally in teaching Aylin to sing Baris Manco (Turkish folk singer) songs.  The same is already true with language. We already keep each other honest by reminding ourselves to speak to Aylin only in Turkish and Spanish.

Another important thing we have going for us: we don’t have to look past our own parents to teach us how to raise bilingual children. They really blazed the trail for us.  Deniz’s Turkish parents and my Ecuadorian parents didn’t buy into the big American immigrant fallacy, which suggests that to assimilate you need to somehow shed off your culture and forget the language. As first-generation, hyphenated-Americans, Deniz and I were raised to love, serve, and bleed red, white, and blue, while preserving the rich, textured, multicolored fabrics that also made us Turkish and Ecuadorian, respectively. Even though our English may have carried a slight accent early on, since we both learned our parents’ languages first, we certainly didn’t allow our accents to bound or curtail our patriotism for the land of our birth.

Our parents also staunchly subscribed to a simple but effective method at home, which we plan to adopt: the “no comprendo” method in my case and the “anlamadim” method in Deniz’s. It simply means, “I don’t understand,” which is exactly what we’d hear our parents say if we tried to pull a fast one on them and talk to them in English at home.  Although our parents spoke English perfectly and were not hard of hearing, they checked it at the door and stubbornly and consistently turned an “English-only” deaf ear on us. The challenge will be a little more difficult for Deniz and I because, unlike our parents, English comes most naturally for us, and because we communicate with each other in English—yet another reason we’re bent on learning each other’s language.

We’ve read a few books on the subject of raising bilingual children. We recognize this quest has its share of detractors, and it can even present some unintended consequences, such as a delay in children speaking. And we also know the road ahead will require patience and relentlessness.  But these are risks and the commitment we’re willing to take on to ensure we do not deny our Aylin of her rightful inheritance. We now completely understand what parents mean when they say they want their kids to be better of than them. We suppose this is a good start towards that end.

Mario Iván Oña is a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer and a freelance journalist. He’s written about music and culture for The Washington Post and various other local and national publications. His published work can be read on his blog: http://vayaconmusic.blogspot.com/. He currently works for the Department of the Navy. He married the love of his life in 2005, and five years later, they had their first child—a little girl. If you look closely at her tiny ring finger, it’s likely you’ll see him wrapped around it.

Photo credit: ali edwards

Editor’s note: This is the third in a week long series of essays for Father’s Day written by papás who are raising bilingual and bicultural children. We hope you come back to read the rest of the essays this week. If you missed anything, you can always go to the introductory post for links to the essays and to our awesome giveaway!

We could get away with everything as kids. Or so we thought. Mom and dad didn’t understand English and if we didn’t want them to know what we were talking about we just switched to that language. It was a weapon. Our way of shielding our “personal” lives and thoughts from them, since none of us ever actually owned or kept a diary in the true sense of the word.

If they protested and demanded we speak in Spanish, we’d do so for a few minutes, before switching back to our second language once again. Or we just wouldn’t say anything anymore.

What we didn’t count on, or realize back then, was that for all our efforts to conceal ourselves from them, they themselves had developed into “masters” of reading between the lines and understanding our individual body languages, all seven of us. On top of that, they did understand more than they let on and every once in a while when our arguments would burst into full blown pleitos, either one of them would tongue lash us with an: ¡ey, no estes diciendo eso! ¿A quién le estás hablando? or a ¡Vale más que se calmen! We immediately did. We might have been cocky, but we weren’t stupid.

Even if our teachers said it was unacceptable to be corporally punished, hasta by one’s own parents, we knew má and pá didn’t play that. If we acted badly, they were going to give us mínimo, unos cintarazos. They were old school, and discipline was one of the many things they weren’t willing to assimilate into the American cultura. My dad’s manotasos were especially painful!

Thanks dad! I thought you should know that this Father’s Day.

In all seriousness, though, as a father myself now, I honestly think I’m at a parental disadvantage because there isn’t a language barrier between Edgar and me. Sure, we can understand each other in English or Spanish, at varying degrees depending on the complexity of the conversation we’re having, but since I don’t have to struggle to interpret his gestures and facial expressions all of the time, I wonder if I’m as in tune with him as my own father was with me. The man could just look at me with his eyes and I knew immediately what he was saying! Usually it was you better settle down if you know what’s good for you. And despite him not being the most vocal man, I understood his smirks, his eye squints, his grunts and even his chuckles… not nearly as well as he understood mine, but I did.

I guess in a way I was reading him too, nonverbally.

The closest Edgar and I have gotten to this level of unspoken language are whistles, secret handshakes and hmms. He’s especially brilliant at the hmms. I’ll call his name and he’ll answer hmm? This really drives me crazy and gives me more reason to just call his name over and over until he answers with a proper, (well not all that proper, my parents would have never accepted this response), what? The handshake I invented one day without thinking too much about it, and it basically consists of six mini-handshakes rolled into a larger one that “only” he and I know. Well, my nephews and some of his friends have been recruited into it as well, but still, it’s a very select group of people!

My whistling is probably what he understands the most. I don’t have to say a thing or make any motions at all. I just whistle a few times and he comes running over to me: hmm? There’s that damn hmm again! Les promoto que lo de whistling para nada lo hago con malas intenciones. It’s just something spontaneous we came up with and both fell in love with really. Wait a minute! I didn’t realize how much of an actual shared and unique form of communication Edgar and I already had. How cool!

Who could ask for a better Father’s Day present?

Juan Alanis is a South Texas based writer living in Houston who owns and operates the blog www.JuanofWords.com. You can read his brand new column at the Houston Chronicle’s La Voz de Houston: Juan of Words – A blog by a Latino for Latinos…y Más. Also, don’t miss Juan’s hilarious misadventures, personal vlogs and random thoughts on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Juanofwords

Photo credit: rAmmoRRison

Editor’s note: This is the second in a week long series of essays for Father’s Day written by papás who are raising bilingual and bicultural children. We hope you come back to read the rest of the essays this week. If you missed anything, you can always go to the introductory post for links to the essays and to our awesome giveaway!

A little over two years ago, on a Tuesday night, I poured myself a glass of red wine (or two, or seven), sat at my computer, and registered a web domain that would be the home of my new brainchild: a blog about raising bilingual, bicultural children. I was ready to jump right in there with Confucius, Socrates, and Bertrand Russell as a great disseminator of wisdom, except my wisdom was on a very specific topic and I had not yet even begun to acquire said wisdom. In other words, I was putting the cart before the horse.

When I look back on the measly forty-four entries I’ve managed to add to my blog, many of which are just me restating how in awe I am of this whole process, and when I look back on the almost four years since my older son was born, one obvious common thread begins to emerge: that I have no idea what I’m doing. This doesn’t mean that I think I’m a lousy parent or that my children’s bilingual skills aren’t impressive by any standard. What I’m saying is that raising bilingual and bicultural children is as confounding and amorphous a concept as parenting itself.

So when I’m asked to reflect on why I chose to raise my boys bilingual, I am tempted to lie and say that it’s because of a visceral identification with my “raza” and my “culture” that burns inside me so deeply and intensely that my hips shake like Ricky Martin’s, even at Sunday mass as the Padre is handing me the Communion wafer. But I am not Católico and for all practical purposes (and I have written about this on my blog), I am a Midwestern Caucasian hipster trapped in the body of a tiny, 30-something, black-haired Colombian immigrant. I dreamed of living in the United States since I was very young and I love this culture. I feel comfortable here—this is my home. I’m not the type of Latino that wears his culture on his sleeve.

So why, then, am I raising my children bilingual?

All the reasons I can come up with seem unromantic and selfish, but are the honest to Jesus truth (forgive me, Padre!):

Because I am bilingual and there is something to be said for a parent passing on a skill to his children, especially when doing so doesn’t take an extraordinary effort on my part.

Because I’ve met enough children of immigrant parents who lament the fact that somewhere along the way the language of the old country got lost in their family, and I don’t need to add items to the list of things my kids are already going to hate me for.

Because occasionally I feel ill equipped to parent two boys who are growing up in a country and a time so removed from my own childhood experience and having them speak the language of my childhood bridges that gap and brings me comfort.

Because when we Skype with my family in Colombia and I see the proud and loving smiles on their faces when my boys talk to them in a Spanish that has hints of our regional accent, it warms my heart and confirms that I’m totally awesome.

Because when we’re at the dinner table and I catch the delighted look on my non-Spanish-speaking-mother-in-law’s face when she sees the Spanish fluency of her grandsons, her delight makes me happy; and because I look up to her, I feel like I, too, am a good parent.

Because when strangers stare in awe and amusement at our young family, watching our boys address each parent in a different language with great ease, I gush and feel proud.

Of course, I’m not about to reveal to my children that this whole bilingual and bicultural upbringing was all a big ploy to repair a gigantic crack in Papá’s self-esteem. As soon as you’re all done reading these words I’ll see if I can make Google forget this page ever existed.

I may end up telling my boys that I raised them bilingual so they would get better SAT scores, so they could get better jobs and one day own a whole Latin American province where they can retire in peace, knowing that their bilingual brains are better wired to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s.

And I will the proud father of two men who will be more complete, more well-rounded individuals than they would have been, had they not grown up knowing two languages and two cultures.

Originally from Manizales, Colombia, Rubén González is a 34 year-old husband and father of two boys, living in Minneapolis. Ruben arrived in the US at the tender age of 20 and since then, he’s worked stints ranging from teacher, to house cleaner and lab technician. Currently, he works as a technology and web guy at a marketing communications agency in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Rubén’s passions (besides his wife and kids) include literature, politics, history, pop culture, and Scandinavian Black and Death Metal. He exposes his neurosis, insecurities, and love for his family on his blog, “Love, Translated – Raising Bilingual, Bicultural Children”.

The author and his daughter

Editor’s note: This is the first in a week long series of essays for Father’s Day written by papás who are raising bilingual and bicultural children. We hope you come back to read the rest of the essays this week. If you missed anything, you can always go to the introductory post for links to the essays and to our awesome giveaway!

Growing up in Miami, Spanish was everywhere. My Cuban mom spoke only Spanish to my brother and I because that was her native language and her English was creaky. When my dad bolted on us for another woman, mami moved us all in with my grandparents, who didn’t speak more than three words of English (‘Hello’ and ‘Sank you’). Spanish was in the priest’s homily at Sunday mass, in the cadence of the old men who drank llaves outside Cochinito Supermarket and argued over baseball and politics, in the house of la tía who took care of us after school four days a week.

Spanish sank into my DNA and I acquired it early and easily, even as I learned the “other” language of our resident country. I remember sitting in Mrs. Yeager’s class during my first day of kindergarten, not knowing any English at all, and not being particularly worried about it. By the end of the school year, I was speaking English fluently to my teacher and classmates, Spanish fluently to my mom and abuelos at home. It was effortless and unconscious, but my family had given me a lifelong gift.

Today, as I attempt to pass on that heritage to my 5-month-old daughter, Elle, and raise her speaking Spanish, things are more complicated. My Spanish has rusted over years of sparse usage (not to mention a decade-and-a-half of reading and writing English for a living). My wife doesn’t speak Spanish. Elle’s grandparents are three states away. And we live in New Orleans, where Spanish is rarely heard.

Spanish wasn’t going to just soak into her system. I needed to make an effort to put it there. During my wife’s pregnancy, I researched and strategized the best way to do this. I discovered remarkable things. One of the most fascinating: Baby brains start readying to acquire language at seven months – in utero. The tiny embryonic brain starts spreading out neural connectors tasked with absorbing syntax and organizing sentence structures. The connectors twitch and stretch in response to the sound of the parents’ voices. So I started reading Spanish lullabies each night to my wife’s swelling belly.

Equally compelling is the fact that language is not a learned skill – it’s an evolutionary human trait, akin to walking on two feet or opposing thumbs. This can be witnessed in the whimsical utterances of children – “You giggled me!” – that aren’t taught to them by parents or learned through imitation. The brain comes hard-wired for language. “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture,” MIT professor Steven Pinkler writes in his insightful book, The Language Instinct.

The fact that language is acquired evolutionarily and starts to develop mind-bogglingly early are important revelations for parents attempting to raise a bilingual child. I continue to speak Spanish to Elle, even though I know I won’t get a reply for another 18 months or so. And I talk to her continuously, despite the fact that my Spanish is at times jagged and busted up. I came across a great anecdote in another helpful book, The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents, which described a father wishing to raise his daughter speaking French, even though his French was rudimentary high-school-learned and not his native language. Not only did his French improve after four years of reading French children’s books, but her French surpassed his in the submersion pre-school she attended. By age 5, she was correcting his French. That’s one of my goals: To one day have Elle correct my Spanish.

So challenges lay ahead and the initiative is on me to stick with it. For now, the CD changer is stacked with Ruben Gonzalez and Benny Moré. Elle’s children books are mostly Spanish and I sing “Como Fue” and “Guantanamera” to her each morning. Often she giggles. Sometimes she just poops her diaper. Spanish-speaking nannies, play dates and vacations are all also in her future.

I may not have Spanish-speaking abuelos nearby or los viejos outside Cochinito. But I have a bright-eyed, gurgling baby girl, the foundation of a beautiful language and the will to see it through.

Rick Jervis is a Cuban-American born in Miami. He graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in Journalism and has worked at The Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal Europe and Chicago Tribune. He lived in Prague, Czech Republic, for 3-1/2 years, covering Eastern Europe for the Wall Street Journal Europe, and spent two years as the Baghdad Bureau Chief for USA TODAY. He currently resides in New Orleans, where he works as the Gulf Coast Correspondent for USA TODAY.  He lives with his wife, Elena, baby daughter Elle, and mixed-breed dog, Juno.

We’re celebrating dads this whole week at SpanglishBaby in preparation for Father’s Day on Sunday, June 19th. We’ve asked several papás/bloggers/journalists, who happen to be raising their children bilingual, to share their experiences with us.

If you’ve been a regular reader of SpanglishBaby, you probably know that we’ve always wished we had more of the male presence in our blog. We appreciate it when we hear the perspective of fathers who are raising bilingual and bicultural kids because, in many cases, passing on our Latino culture is up to them.

I’m thrilled to present all four of them to you and truly hope you take the time to read their essays. Each brings a different story as to why they’ve chosen to raise their sons and daughters with two (or more) languages and cultures.

Tuesday — Rick Jervis, a fellow journalist and a long-time friend of mine, ponders the difference between his upbringing as a Cuban-American in Miami and that of his daughter’s who he’s raising bilingual in New Orleans.

Wednesday — Rubén González, who blogs about raising two bilingual and bicultural boys in Minnesota and other things over at Love, Translated, tells us his reasons for raising his kids this way don’t necessarily have to do with a strong identification with his “raza” or Latino culture.

Thursday — Juan Alanis, a journalist and blogger who’s writing I was immediately drawn to after reading his often hysterical blog Juan of Words, explores how he feels there’s a disadvantage in not having a language barrier between father and son, as he did growing up.

Friday — Mario Iván Oña, another fellow journalist and friend I’ve known since high school, shares the story of how he and his wife consider language and culture (his family is from Ecuador and her family is from Turkey) the best inheritance they can leave their daughter.

And to honor the special men in our lives who share the belief that bilingualism and biculturalism are the best gifts we can give our children, don’t forget to check out the awesome giveaway we’ve put together for all dads!

How do you plan on honoring the fathers in your life?