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Editor’s note: We’re dedicating this whole week to Back to {Bilingual} School. We have a variety of posts that we hope will make the transition easier regardless of what your kids’ schooling situation is. We hope you come back all week to read the posts by our amazing guests and to enter the awesome giveaways we’ve put together for you! Unlike most parents who feel that the start of school actually means a step back in their children’s ability toRead More ...

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 weRead More ...

How do I build my own proficiency in my non-native language to help my daughter become bilingual? My husband and I are trying the One Parent, One Language method with our 1 year old daughter in Atlanta. I speak to her in Spanish, while he speaks to her in English. She also goes to a trilingual (Spanish, French and Mandarin) preschool three days a week in Atlanta. I consider myself a near-native Spanish speaker, having lived and gone to schoolRead More ...

Before our baby was born, my husband and I had a silent agreement, “We’d raise a multilingual child.”  I won’t deny, I was worried, would this delay her speech? I often wondered if she’d be confused by hearing all three languages spoken at once. Friends said babies were like sponges, they absorb everything, so my worrying went away, well, decreased.  And so our daughter was born and we began speaking all three languages.  My husband’s native language is Croatian, mine isRead More ...

Editor’s note: In celebration of Mother’s Day next week, we are honoring all mothers who do everything they can to give their children the awesome gift of bilingualism and biculturalism. We’ve invited several amazing mamás who are doing just that to tell us all about it in our Week of SpanglishBaby Moms. Each one of them brings a completely different look at bilingualism. All the moms are bloggers too and if you didn’t know about them before, I’m sure you’llRead More ...

Last week we posted the following question on our Facebook fan page: “What has been your biggest obstacle in raising a bilingual child?” Within minutes, we had tons of answers explaining all kinds of different obstacles. But soon it was clear which were the most prevalent (in no particular order): #1 You’re the only one who speaks Spanish at home (or the OPOL method is hard to do) I’ve always kind of silently envied those who use the OPOL methodRead More ...

I am so happy I found this site! I came to the U.S. from Buenos Aires about 30 years ago. My English is way stronger than my Spanish. I have a bright 7 year old son. I’ve spoken to him since infancy in Spanish (OPOL). He used to speak only in Spanish to me, but now speaks and responds in English 90% of the time (this began in Kindergarten). He is really quite bright and just started 3rd grade (heRead More ...