Mami, hoy es January?

That’s my 5-year-old asking from the back seat.

I’m thrilled — finally the kids are getting the hang of time — the difference between seconds, minutes, days and months. But his question is also a harsh reminder.

He is learning most of these new concepts in school.

In school, they teach purely in English.

And now the corollary — my husband and I, their only Spanish teachers, will never be able to keep up.

We had recently given ourselves some real pats on the back. Congrats to us! Our twins are 5 and are still speaking Spanish! We “made it.” And yet, the more time goes by, the more I realize the quest to raise bilingual kids never, ever (ever, ever, you get the point) ends.

They grow, they learn — and they need to do both in two languages. Somehow, somewhere, between trying to raise well-mannered, confident, curious beings, between instilling a work ethic, love of books and a sense of spirituality and empathy — we’re talking basics here people, not Tiger Mom stuff — we still have to find time to ensure that their Spanish progresses.

I didn’t actually expect to reach this point now. About a month ago, I had decided that since the kids’ language skills were on solid footing, I’d dedicate 2013 to go a step further to teach them more about their Hispanic heritage. Over Christmas, I wrote up a whole plan, a timeline, links to all the books and projects we were going to tackle so that they could learn more  about la madre patria, and Latin America and the Caribbean in general.  But then came enero, and the questions from the back seat.

I am tired.

Last year, I wrote a post on six things I wish I’d known before I started raising bilingual kids.

I’ll add another: I wish I’d known this process was life long.

I wouldn’t have changed course, but I would have adjusted my expectations.

{Photo by popofatticus}

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.

“My husband and I are raising our sons to be trilingual–I speak to them in Spanish and he speaks to them in German. He will learn English since it is the majority language, and he understands it since my husband and I speak to each other in English. My oldest son, 22 months, has done very well with both languages, and easily moves between Spanish and German. The problem is, when he speaks, he almost always uses the second person singular form, the ‘tu’ form. Rather than saying ‘I want milk’ (‘quiero leche’), he says ‘you want milk’ (‘quieres leche’). My husband says that he makes the exact same error in German. I feel that with more exposure to the language, my son will correct this error on his own. My husband feels that we should tell him the correct way to say the sentence. I have tried my husband’s method, but my son continues to make the same error. Should we address his errors, and if so how?”

Dear Susan,

I think you and your husband are both right.  You’re right that your son will probably get his pronouns straight in a month or two by himself.  If he doesn’t, though, you may want to help him along, as your husband suggests.  But not by correcting him.

If we think about it, what the child has to learn is really pretty complicated.  When we call someone by name, the name doesn’t change. You are Susan whether you’re the speaker or the listener.  But the terms change when it’s “you” and “I.”  You are “I” when you’re the speaker, but you are “you” when your son is the speaker. You call your boy “you”—so he figures he’s “you.” (The other person may be “I.”) Many children go through this stage you describe, although most do it so briefly we don’t notice it.  They overhear others switching “you” and “I,” and get the idea that they need to do it, too. Others, like my grandson (!), stay in that stage almost a year.  My grandson E would say things like “Mommy, change your diaper!” (meaning his diaper, since his mother doesn’t wear them : ).  When he wanted someone not to play with his fire engine, he said “I can’t touch it.  I can’t touch it” in a distressed tone of voice.  The other kids couldn’t figure out that he meant “you” meaning “them,” so it was hard for them to cooperate with him.

I confess I was worried because for some children, this failure to change the point of view in their sentences may be associated with autism. When my grandson was 3, he was speaking a lot and had a tremendous memory, but was still not reversing his pronouns.  So, I’d say, “Oh look, E says, Please Grandma, will you push me in the swing. Can you say that?”  Or, “E says, Grandma, I want you to hug me.  Now you say it.”  (And of course, then I got to hug him.)  For a while, he just repeated my sentences like a parrot, but after a few months, he would hesitate like he noticed something was different, but didn’t know what. I didn’t say, “No, you’re wrong.  Do it like this.”  I just gave him the correct model and tried to make sure he was attending to it.

Eventually, E changed.  We don’t know when. We just noticed that he was reversing the “you” and “I” like everyone else.  Of course, we have no way of knowing whether my little tricks worked or whether he just finally grew out of it. In any event, since we made it like a game, no harm was done.

After a few months, if your son hasn’t changed or if you are worried, you should consult a speech-language therapist.  This isn’t an issue of bilingualism, but it would be good to find an SLT who is familiar with bi- or trilinguals, so he or she doesn’t automatically say the problem comes from hearing too many languages—as often happens.

It is so interesting that your son does this in two languages, and it makes perfect sense.  If I had spoken with you before I wrote my book, I would have asked you if I could put your example in it.  Let me know how it goes.

Best wishes,

Barbara Zurer Pearson

Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph. D. - A bilingualism expert with over twenty years of research experience in the fields of bilingualism, linguistics, and communication disorders, Pearson is the author of the informative and extremely useful book Raising a Bilingual Child. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her pioneering work on bilingual learning by infants and children and on language assessment has been published in scholarly journals and in the book Language and Literacy in Bilingual Children. As Project Manager, she contributed to the creation of the innovative DELV tests, culture-fair assessments of language development published by The Psychological Corporation. You can see her answers by going here.

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