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.

El Día del Padre / Father’s Day is coming up this June 17 and I’ve been a little stumped at what creative gift Sofía will give her Papi.  Recently I read an article about how people who received gifts in fancy wrapping tended to like the gifts considerably more than people who received the same gift but not wrapped as nicely.  I think this is super-true and certainly applies to children’s art as well.  I think any piece of art, well framed or mounted, makes more of a difference than merely giving a piece of construction paper with gems and glitter (or screws and bolts) glued on!

It has been a while since Sofía has given her framed art to Papi as a present, and so we put on our Thinking Sombreros and thus, Toolbox Treasure Art was born!

Get ready to make your own personalized Toolbox Treasure Art!  Gather up your toolbox extras, some glue, a permanent marcador and a framed canvas.  (The framed canvas is by far the most expensive item in this activity.

The first two steps I recommend doing are things that I learned after our project was complete.  First, I recommend assisting your Little Picasso to creatively craft a visual “frame” on the canvas with something.  We used plastic cord ties, but I think that colored electrical or painter’s tape would work well also.

In step 2, decide where the byline and Felicidades will be written so that it will be seen amongst the treasures that will soon be glued on.

Next, place all the treasures from the tool box in a container.  I used a veggie tray container not only for easy access for Sofía’s little manos, but for its aesthetic properties as well!  Add another dimension to your craft by reviewing the material names en Español! (Planning ahead of time is really important for this step because, for example, some of the items I used, I didn’t know the name of in any language!)

Providing glue nearby, (I like to place the glue right on a small paper plate.) allow your Angelito to choose whichever tool box treasure she or he wishes to glue on the canvas.  And Mamás….resist the urge to direct your Angelito as to where to put the treasures on the canvass.   Everything doesn’t need to be perfect, straight, in-line, or balanced. Once your glue has dried, you may have to secure a few things here and there with a hot glue gun or more liquid glue.

The end result is a fabuloso piece of art that your Little Picasso will be so proud to give to Papi and Papi will be sure to show off and proudly display!

¡Feliz Día del Padre!

Photo by Aaron Escobar

Not lots to share with you this first Sunday of June… Although both Ana and I are very excited about a new website related to bilingualism and reading. It’s called Bilingual Readers and it’s actually a “publishing company which provides bilingual resources for families and communities.” Go over there whenever you get a chance and check it out! We can’t tell you how happy we are that more and more sites related to bilingualism are appearing all the time…

1) From LBBC–Father’s Day: Celebrate Dads and Reading – Links to different book lists that celebrate fathers and grandfathers and includes a number of heartwarming books from different cultures and ethnic traditions, including some bilingual English/Spanish books. All these are definitely worth checking out!

2) From Time Magazine: Study: TV May Inhibit Babies’ Language Development – “As most parents of small children will reluctantly admit, nothing can occupy a child quite like television. Unfortunately, the scientific evidence suggests that using the boob tube as a babysitter has its price: the more time babies spend sitting in front of the screen, the more their social, cognitive and language development may suffer. Recent studies show that TV-viewing tends to decrease babies’ likelihood of learning new words, talking, playing and otherwise interacting with others.” Vanessa doesn’t really watch a lot of TV. We don’t have cable and apart from V-me and PBS, there’s not a lot of “quality” programming out there anyway. However, she does watch movies and I often feel guilty about that because she truly loves them and it keeps her entertained for at least a good hour… Now I feel even more guilty. Great.

3) From Bilingual Readers: Want to Help Your Baby’s Language Development Along? Read Together! – “While banning television from your home forever is neither practical nor necessary (thank God), the bottom line is crystal clear: babies learn language best through direct interaction with their parents and other caregivers. This conclusion is even more important for families who are trying to raise their children in more than one language. Of course there are many ways for parents to interact directly with their children, but we at Bilingual Readers believe that one of the most effective ways is through shared parent-child reading.” Thank God Vanessa has picked up my love for reading. I don’t feel so guilty about the movie thing I mentioned above anymore… At least we’re doing something right!

4)  From PRWeb: Bilingual Tots Total Immersion Language Schools Success Leads to National Expansion, Hiring Thousands of Teachers – “Bilingual Tots – based in Boulder, Colorado – offers total immersion in the target language with native teachers in order to help them capture the authentic accent and sound system of the language they’re learning. Parents of children 0 to 3 must be present during class, and all parents are given materials that help reinforce the language learning at home. Each 50-minute Bilingual Tots class is limited to no more than six children so that each teacher can devote time to one-on-one interaction in addition to group activities that center on play and simple interaction with the native-speaker teachers.” In my neck of the woods and I didn’t even know about it. I’ll have to check them out and get back to you…

5) From NPR: Weighing Ethnicity When Picking a Spouse – “As the old saying goes: “Love is blind.” But for the American-born children of immigrants, it’s sometimes impossible not to look at ethnicity when picking a partner.” Another great read – or listen – from NPR’s series: Immigrants’ Children. I know how I feel about this one, but I would love to hear what you all think, though! I wonder how Vanessa  – who is the American-born child of immigrants – will feel about this topic? Luckily, we won’t have to deal with this one for many, many years to come. Ha!

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Photo by luis de bethencourt

As we announced last week, a new expert has joined the SpanglishBaby family and we couldn’t be more excited! Her name is Liza Sánchez and her area of expertise is bilingual education. She received her MA in Education at UC Berkeley and has spent many years teaching in both public and independent schools. She is the founder and Board Chair of Escuela Bilingüe Internacional (EBI) in Oakland, California. EBI is the first independent school in California to offer a Spanish-English dual language program, extending from pre-K through 8th grade. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is fluent in Spanish and English, speaks conversational German and can understand quite a bit of French, Portuguese and Italian.

Liza Sánchez

As if all this weren’t enough, another super interesting thing about Liza is that she’s a mom to four multilingual daughters between the ages of 2 and 18. Talk about going through the stages in this journey! Here’s how Liza describes her household situation when it comes to languages: “We speak Spanish at home, English in the community and German with my mother who they see frequently. My five and seven-year old also attended a German preschool where my 2 year-old will soon go. My oldest is now learning her fifth language. She learned Spanish at home and is now studying Spanish literature in school, she attended a French-American school, studied German in high school and with my mother and is now learning Arabic. She’s one lucky kid.”

Wow! Sounds amazing and inspiring, right?

Ok, on to this week’s question and answer:

Will translating everything overwhelm and confuse my child?

This week’s question came from Marianna Coll who lives in Los Angeles with her 27-month-old girl and husband. They are both from Venezuela and use the mL@H method.

“We are the proud parents of a bilingual girl who is absorbing both cultures at a very fast rate. In occasions I find that I am the only one who can fully understand her since she switches so much back and forth from both languages.

At her toddler group, one of the teachers communicated to me that at this age she shouldn’t know as much as she does, she knows her colors really well, most in English and recognizes shapes and all the letters of the alphabet. This she does solely in English. Sometimes I repeat the word or the letter in Spanish, but I don’t want to overwhelm her. With the numbers, once she processed them in English, she started counting then in Spanish and I feel that she will do the same with the rest.

My question is: should I repeat everything in Spanish after she says it in English? Since I know that many of her friends are not near knowing the letters, I don’t want to confuse her and over-saturate her little brain that absorbs so much. Or, should I let her assimilate it on her own like she did with numbers and is starting to do with colors?

Another thing is that the school that we chose none of the teachers speak Spanish and I am OK with that because I am really happy with the school that we chose, we can give her Spanish at home, that can be our special thing, so I don’t want her to feel left out and not being able to communicate, there is a little girl in her school that her parents only spoke in Hebrew to her and she is having a really hard time understanding and participating in class.

Thanks!

Dear Marianna:

Congratulations on raising a bilingual child! As you have already experienced, it isn’t easy. In fact, it can be quite challenging to maintain your native language as your child grows. There is so much English surrounding them that it can become difficult to assure they receive adequate opportunities to use their home language. Since your child is in an English environment at school, you and your husband will need to continue to use only Spanish with her at home. It sounds like she is already speaking quite a bit of English since you are feeling the need to repeat what she says in Spanish.

It is best to avoid becoming a translator. She needs to be able to think in each language independently. In addition, you will need to encourage her to use only Spanish with you. That might mean not responding when she addresses you in English thereby forcing her to use Spanish. Don’t be worried that she might not know how to say something. She’ll find a way to let her desires be known without using English.

Your main concern seems to be about overwhelming your child and confusing her with both English and Spanish. I want to assure you that it is not possible to over-saturate her brain with too much language. Most children around the world learn 2 if not 3-4 languages simultaneously. Children have even been documented learning up to 5-6 languages simultaneously with no problem. Your daughter, at her age, is a powerful language-learning machine. Her brain is wired to take it all in. That is her job right now and it appears she is doing a very good job of it.

According to Dr. Susan Curtiss, a Professor of Linguistics at UCLA who specializes in the way children learn languages:

“…the power to learn language is so great in the young child that it doesn’t seem to matter how many languages you seem to throw their way…They can learn as many spoken languages as you can allow them to hear systematically and regularly at the same time. Children just have this capacity. Their brain is just ripe to do this…there doesn’t seem to be any detriment to…develop(ing) several languages at the same time.”

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association confirms this belief:

“Children all over the world learn more than one language without developing speech or language problems. Bilingual children develop language skills just as other children do.”

It sounds like your child is well on her way to becoming bilingual. She is lucky to have such dedicated parents who are ensuring her success. I wish you much luck!

If you want more info about bilingual education, you can also find Liza blogging about it at Bilingual Talk.

Do you have a question for our experts? Remember no question is too big or too simple. So, to send us your question, please click here or leave a comment below. Thank you!