Do you have what it takes to raise a bilingual child?

Pretty bold statement, huh? But the reality is that many parents make the decision to not teach their child a second language because they don’t believe they’re capable of doing it or they feel don’t have the resources they need. It could be that they feel that:

• they are not fluent enough in the second language
• their partner or family doesn’t support them
• not enough people around them that speaks the second language
• they did speak to or exposed their child to the second language, but he only responds in English now

These are all valid arguments and I completely understand that every family is unique and there are so many circumstances that can lead to the decisions we make with our kids. So, this is not about passing judgement, but about encouragement and understanding that we’ve all been at that breaking point at some time.

Read: 5 Biggest Obstacles When Raising Bilingual Children

I doubt any of us can deny that to raise a truly bilingual child nowadays you must possess these 5 essentials:

1.Desire. This is a key trait in every parent raising a bilingual child. At least one of the parents must have a clear desire and want for their child to speak two or more languages. The motivation behind the desire can be any, such as a need to connect with the language of your family’s heritage or just to give them an advantage in many aspects of life. This desire will drive every other aspect of your bilingual journey plan.

2. Commitment. Once the desire is cemented, the next step is to make a firm commitment to yourself, your partner and your child to take the steps necessary to immerse him in the second language as much as possible in order to give him the necessary exposure. This commitment will become a way of life for your family. It’s better if it starts from the day the baby is born, or even before that, since research proves that for the bilingual brain to develop, the sooner the better.

3. Strategies. A clear map and plan-of-action guided by your desire and your commitment to raise your child bilingually is a must. You and your partner — as well as any immediate family that will be a key part of the child’s life — should choose a method that works for your home and decide to stick with it. Maybe this means that dad is the one that speaks Spanish to the child and mom speaks English because she’s not fluent, but you both make sure that any media exposure will be in Spanish and you will do everything possible to find other ways to expose her to the language. The scenarios vary, it’s up to you to commit to the strategies that work for you and be consistent.

4. Consistency. This is key. The child must know that any strategy you adopt is the way of the land. Children thrive on consistency in most aspects of their life, and bilingualism is no exception. Stick to the strategies you adopt, and if you’re the one speaking in the second language to her, make sure it’s always that way.

5. Resources/Community Support. Not everyone will have a village to help them raise a bilingual child, but it’s important to feel connected and have some access to asking questions, relating stories and finding resources. We hope to be some of that here and on Facebook, Twitter and SpanglishBaby Playground. You can also find or form local playgroups or find a bilingual preschool or school to place your child in to pretty much guarantee their bilingual upbringing.

So now, tell me, do you have what it takes to raise a bilingual child? You’re here. You’re reading this. I’ll say you totally do!

My daughter has been attending her dual immersion school in Spanish for almost three months now and I can honestly say she’s made a lot of progress. I think the most noticeable improvement has been in her increased self-esteem and the value she’s now given to speaking Spanish.  She tries much harder to complete sentences in Spanish and doesn’t get frustrated when I nudge her to speak it.

My husband keeps insisting that she’s speaking way too much English and he’s not sure she’ll be speaking fluent Spanish with us anymore. I always disagree and ask him to perceive the small details that have changed. Things like her asking us to put the Spanish option on when she watches Phineas and Ferb or Doc McStuffins on Disney Junior, something that was seriously not happening months, even days, before school started. She also asks us which of her books are in Spanish so that we can read those for her at night. Not only that, I notice many new words that were not part of her vocabulary that she’s now throwing in the mix of her mostly-Spanglish phrases.

And that’s what her “language” really is right now at this stage – a mix of Spanish and English – but not the kind to shudder at. What I mean is that the words she uses are said correctly in each language, she’s just mixing words from both languages into one sentence.

Read: My Daughter is Not as Bilingual as I Thought

I was noticing this a lot more this weekend after her friend came to play. It always seems like it takes her a while to switch back from English-only mode when she’s with friends, to trying-to-speak-Spanish mode with her mom and dad. At that moment it dawned on me that every time I’d make her repeat in Spanish whatever she was so excited to tell me about (and she’s notorious for non-stop chatter!), she had to make an effort to “grab” the words she needed.

What I realized is that even though she’s making tremendous progress at school, and her love for Spanish and the fact she’s bilingual is at an all-time high, we still need to make a lot more effort at making sure Spanish is front and center in her life and her brain. Her receptive Spanish-language skills are perfect, yet she’s lacking in her expressive skills.

Read: 5 Ways to Motivate Your Child to Speak Spanish When he Refuses to

My conclusion of this is that we definitely need to immerse her a lot more in situations where she will need to express herself in Spanish. She needs to use the words much more without having to think about them. I know they are all there because they eventually come out, but it needs to become a fluid process.

I’m not worried about it happening, but it did make me realize that raising a bilingual child is definitely a work-in-progress that requires many tools in the toolbox. Not the same tools will work for all since every family is different and unique, but we do all need an arsenal of tricks until we find what works best for our kids.

Share with me in the comments below what you do that works the best. What bilingualism stage is your child at?

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.

It’s been a very hectic few months for me after coming back from my six week trip to Chile. There, as you may have read, my son Matías really picked up and strengthened his Spanish. It was an amazing transformation, one that both my husband and I are extremely proud of. He just beams with pride when people realize his son can easily transition from Spanish to English without getting mixed up or asking for help.

However, it seems like not everyone feels the same way, and the negativity is coming from our own family. At the beginning of August, we went to my brother-in-law’s wedding. His wife, is Ecuadorian and raised in the U.S. She speaks Spanish but has admitted that she doesn’t feel completely comfortable speaking the language, and jokes that she will send her kids to my house to learn the language, but she loves that I am teaching him Spanish and she now makes more of an effort to speak to him too. Naturally, many of her guests were family from Ecuador and each of them came up to my husband and I praising our language efforts with Matías saying, “Qué bueno que le enseñen español. Bien hecho.” Needless to say, we were ecstatic and extremely proud; how could we not be?

However, my in-laws who know that I speak Spanish to him and have heard us in action many times have never commented on the subject. But on that particular day I called Matías, who was standing by his grandfather, to come over to where I was. My father-in-law looked at me, then back at the guests, laughed and blurted out some random words and sounds as if speaking Spanish blatantly mocking me. I froze in shock. It was not a mistake; it was deliberate. I kept my cool and continued to speak to him in Spanish then changing to English at the end saying “Now you can go with Grandpa” and I walked away so that he wouldn’t see my blushed face. I was beyond hurt and livid!

I just couldn’t understand — I make every effort to speak English in front of them and in their home so that they don’t feel left out, but they do know that we are a bilingual family and that’s not going to change. I told my husband and he was just as surprised as me, not knowing how to really approach this issue because, clearly, they are bothered by it.

Knowing so many of us come from both English and Spanish speaking families, I ask you, how should I deal with this? Have you had a similar experience?

{photo by  leonshishman}

Jada of Quiero Mi Baby

MTV Tr3s’s new show, Quiero Mi Baby premiered on Monday April 16th – it’s a new series that shows the realities of cross-cultural parenting including language, religion and tradition clashes, in addition to many other issues unique to bi/multicultural families. Quiero Mi Baby is a show I relate to on many levels and I know a lot of our SpanglishBaby familia will as well.

Check out this exclusive preview (meaning YOU WILL ONLY SEE IT HERE!) of tonight’s episode and then see our interview with the couple, Jada and Kristian, below.

Episode description: “Jada, la gringuita, moved to Mexico for the love of the Latin Culture and to learn Spanish. But she never expected to fall in love with Kristian, a Mexican musician that fell for her instantly. From this love, Jada became pregnant, so she decides that the best thing to do is to go back to the states to be with her family during her pregnancy. Jada and Kristian go through really rough times given that Kristian does not have his visa to come visit Jada, not even when their baby is born! Will this couple be able to be together again and create a family for their baby boy? Don’t miss this touching Tr3s’ original series Quiero Mi Baby episode to find out how love can cross any boundaries!”

SpanglishBaby talks to Jada

SB: The preview of your episode was difficult for me to watch. I’m also a “gringa” who fell in love with a Latin American man and although we were never separated by the border as you were with Kristian, it was something my husband and I worried about in our first few years together. What made you decide to leave Kristian behind in Mexico and come have your baby in the United States?

Jada: Several factors were discussed, the first is that we wanted our son to have American citizenship and we knew that if he was born in another country the process would be very lengthy. We figured worst case scenario I would be alone for the first 6 months of the pregnancy, while Kristian’s paperwork came through. We never expected it to be one year before we would bring him to the States. Second, I wanted a natural childbirth and I was told that communication was key in this process. I wanted to make sure I had a strong English speaking medical team so I can understand everything that was happening. I didn’t want to find myself needing to have translated what’s happening mid-birth, that made me nervous. I needed to be sure the environment would be calm and smooth, so this was the best solution for us.

SB: The description of the episode says that you moved to Mexico for your love of Latin culture and to learn Spanish – Where did that passion for Latin culture come from? How far are you in your Spanish studies and how, as a non-native speaker, do you plan to raise your new baby boy to be bilingual?

Jada: I turned 30 in September and at 4 years old I have a very vivid memory of encountering a Mexican family, and listening to someone my age speak to her mom – and I thought ‘wow she’s saying the same thing but in a different way.’ From that moment on I was very intrigued by the culture and being Italian, there are many similarities. My family also fostered a lot of relationships with friends who were Mexican and Cuban growing up, so I was surrounded by the culture quite often.

I feel confident about speaking the language and understand it well… sometimes my grammar and tenses are off which is embarrassing but my in-laws are very proud and supportive. And yes, I definitely want our son to be bilingual. We only speak Spanish at home and we take him to Spanish story time at the library.

SpanglishBaby talks to Kristian

SB: As I told Jada, the preview for your Quiero Mi Baby episode was difficult for me to watch – Many other people have been in your position including friends of mine who are living far away from their husbands and/or father of their children due to lack of a visa – it’s heartbreaking. I wonder, do you worry much that your son is growing up outside of your culture and language?

Kristian: He’s growing up different than I because of the environment and where we live but we reinforce my culture and language in the home as much as possible. I take him to Latin dance classes, festivals, my in-laws teach me Mexican recipes when we see each other. I talk to my family in Mexico about 2-3 times a week. And we plan to travel as much as possible when the baby is older, so he can grow up around cousins and family. Given that we’re both teachers, I’ve also thought about moving the family to Mexico for the summers.

SB: I noticed in the video that you speak Spanish to Jada and the baby – is it important to you that your son is bilingual? Why?

Kristian: I’m an artist by trade and when it comes to storytelling, poetry in Spanish, it’s so engaging and I want my son to love it, and to understand, and it’s just not the same translated – the emotion is not the same. I want to teach my son and share experiences with him in my native language. It’s where I feel most comfortable and confident that I’m getting my message across.

Do you relate to Kristian & Jada’s story? Want to see what happens?

Watch Quiero Mi Baby on MTV’s Tr3s Mondays at at 9pm ET or on Tr3s.com.

In the lasts months I´ve been buried in all types of research and studies regarding bilinguals because of all the material I  needed for the book we´re writing. Not that I need to be any more convinced about raising my daughter bilingually, it´s just fascinating to read about studies that basically take pictures of the brain, called neuroimaging, to clearly map out how the brains of bilinguals are different from monolinguals. They say a picture tells a thousand words, and these do!

One such study was conducted last year at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. We told you all about it and the findings in this post- Bilingual Babies: The Sooner, The Better.

In a nutshell, their conclusions suggest that the brain of a baby who has heard more than one language since birth (or even in-utero) remains more receptive to learning more languages for a longer period of time than a monolingual brain. That´s why we always say that the sooner you learn a second language, the easier it will be for you to learn more down the road.

What I also found fascinating about this particular study is that while conducting the Bilingual Baby Project, researchers also found and pinpointed three things that are very important for a baby´s overall bilingual comprehension skills; all of which are up to the parents to be aware of and execute.

3 Important Factors to Consider When Raising a Bilingual Child

1. The amount of exposure to each language. Babies and children need to hear the minority language being spoken to them 50-60% percent of their waking hours. It´s important that this exposure comes from human interaction, and not as much from media usage. Media is an important complement, but not something to rely on. Talk to your baby all the time from the day he/she is born. Talk, read, sing-out-loud, immerse him in an all-Spanish environment which could be a playgroup where all the moms are speaking Spanish.

2.The strategies parents use to raise a bilingual child. The two most used and most effective strategies to raise bilingual kids are One Parent One Language (OPOL) and Minority Language at Home (mL@H.) OPOL is when one of the parents speaks one language and the other parent another, all the time. For OPOL to be effective, the commitment from the parents has to be very clear and they must stick to their assigned language all the time. For a deeper insight into the OPOL method, check out these posts.

The mL@H method is the one Roxana and I use because we speak only Spanish at home with our husbands, all the time. English is pretty much not allowed among the three of us in my house. We´ve purposely created a home environment where the minority language can thrive and so my girl can associate Spanish to the comfort of family and home.

In short, what´s really essential is to have a strategy and commit to it. Flexibility is important because you have to adapt with your child´s needs and changing family conditions, but try to be as committed as possible because children do thrive on routine and consistency.

3. The parents’ desires to raise bilingual children. I love this one! Rarely do scientific linguistic research touch upon desire, at least to my knowledge, and I certainly believe it´s one of the most important factors. Both you and your spouse (if there is one) need to truly want and desire for this child to be bilingual. The reasons are usually personal and have to do with nostalgia, family ties, and a cultural bond, and these are the best! It´s that burning desire and want which will constantly drive you to have a method and stick to it; it will also motivate you to find a playgroup, the right dual immersion school, to travel, etc. I will go on a limb and say that desire is the driving force behind a bilingual child. Your desire comes first and that will feed into her´s.

What do you think? What is the one factor that has been the most effective in your bilingual journey, and/or the one you wished you had more of?

{Photo by efleming }

Image by :Raúl A.

Before Vanessa started preschool a couple of months after she turned two, I often wondered how she was going to survive for four hours surrounded solely by English. I worried that others would think she had no manners because even though she already understood the concept of “gracias” and “por favor,” she knew nothing about “thanks” and “please.” I explained the situation to her teachers and they reassured me everything would be fine. You see, up until then, her life had only revolved around Spanish.

To be honest, before she was born, we didn’t really give much thought to what method we’d use to raise our daughter bilingual. I mean, both my husband and I knew we were going to speak to her only in Spanish because she’d learn English in school. The same method had worked in the past with my husband’s son who is now a bilingual teenager. Truth be told, I didn’t even know there was a name for the method we were using…

Minority Language at Home (mL@H)

When I started doing research for SpanglishBaby, I found out it’s called the Minority Language at Home or mL@H. This method is self-explanatory, but it’s important to point out that neither you nor your partner have to be native speakers of the minority language you’ll be using exclusively at home. In other words, as long as you are both fluent in the minority language – which in this country is anything other than English – this method will work for you.

I have a bilingual (Spanish/English) friend who lives in the Northeast and has been using this method with her children aged 8 and 9 from the beginning. They are bilingual alright, but it has been a difficult road since they live in an area with virtually no Hispanic community. This means that the only Spanish her kids get is at home from her, her husband and the nanny. The result: even though her kids are bilingual, the truth is they speak English most of their waking hours. Her strategy has been to be as strict as possible about talking to them exclusively in Spanish. In fact, many times her kids will address her in English and she’ll respond by asking them to repeat it in Spanish.

One Parent – One Language (OPOL)

The most popular system in both Europe and Canada is the one in which one parent speaks one language and the other one speaks another. There are several combinations of this method. For example, each parent speaks their own native language which is a minority language and the majority language is learned outside the home. In this case, the child would grow up with three languages. Another option is that the father speaks the majority language and the mother the minority one. Based on absolutely no scientific evidence but on my own observations of my daughter’s bilingual playgroup, it seems as if the latter example is the most common one.

Another friend of mine who has been using OPOL – although not exclusively – since her son was born two years ago, explains some of the problems she’s encountered with this method. “Ideally, I’d never speak to him in English, but for some reason, when my husband is home, I feel a little weird, as if I am excluding him from our conversation.” So, she ends up speaking in English. Actually this is a very common worry and a subject of which we’ll write about in posts to come.

Time and Place (T&P)

This type of method is what’s most often used at schools with bilingual programs. For example, the minority language is used in the morning and the majority language in the afternoon. Or, like in the bilingual school I attended, some subjects – such as math or science – are in the minority language one school year and in the majority language the next. This strategy refers less to family life than the other two.

From what I gather, none of these methods seem to be fail-proof and although consistency is important, flexibility is even more so. Even if you start with one method, who’s to say that a few months down the road you realize another method might work better for your family or for your current situation?

What method do you use to raise your kids bilingual? What problems have you encountered with the method you’ve chosen?