raising

I’m tired…culturally exhausted. I could speak Spanish all day, no problema. But lately, it seems like that’s not enough for me to be accepted by Spanish speakers. I can’t change my deep-seated values or my general way of being, but I am feeling pressured to do so in order to just be part of my extended family. I’ve had some minor clashes with my mother-in-law and stepdaughters recently that are making me reevaluate how I’m really seen by the LatinoRead More ...

Happy 2010 to all of you! After a much needed break, SpanglishBaby is back in full force! Since we’re starting a new decade and will be celebrating our first anniversary next month, we’ve decided to make a few changes to our growing online community. Although we’ll reveal most of them at a later time, we are at this time announcing our call for monthly paid contributors. What we’re looking for: Whether you’ve been following us since we published our firstRead More ...

Have you ever heard of a blogging carnival? I hadn’t until we were recently invited to participate in one. A carnival is basically a blog event dedicated to a specific subject and including several links to other blog posts dealing with said subject. This carnival’s topic? You guessed it: raising bilingual children. So, how does it work? In this particular case, Eve, over at Blogging on Bilingualism, is the host of October’s carnival. So, last week she wrote this postRead More ...

The research I've read - and there isn't a lot out there - talks mostly about families using the OPOL method and it suggests that parents tend to be less strict about using the method once a sibling is born. Since this is not our case, I don't really know what happens in families using the mL@H method. I mean, we pretend to continue doing the same thing we've been doing all along, mostly because as I've explained in the past, it's what comes naturally to us. In terms of what happened at this weekend's party, I had actually expected Vanessa to use mostly English. But I was happily surprised, again! She actually did her own share of code-switching between English and Spanish and for no apparent reason. I wonder i ...

Another week, another roundup of great stuff related to all things bilingual, including a summer reading list that you will love! 1) Census Bureau Estimates Nearly Half of Children Under Age 5 Are Minorities – The U.S. Census Bureau today released national population estimates showing that our nation is becoming older and more racially and ethnically diverse. The estimates found that nearly half (47 percent) of the nation’s children younger than five were a minority in 2008, with 25 percentRead More ...