How to raise a bilingual child?

[Lindyhopper]

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My wife & I are blessed with a fabulously beautiful, healthy, & developmental normal 6.5 month old daughter. She babbles “dadada”, “bababa”, & some sort of “g”. She recognizes the sign for “milk” with a huge laughing smile. She recently seems to distinguish strangers from people she sees daily.
Although I recently started to listen to Spanish language tapes when driving around, my wife & I really only speak English. My sister-in-law, two teenager nieces, & a friendly neighbor are all fluent in both English & Spanish. They all see our baby regularly. So far people have only spoken to our baby in English.
When & if do you think it’s desirable to have people speak to her in Spanish?

 

[deleted109597]

As early and as often as possible.
Buy her bilingual toys. Have her aunt only speak to her in spanish. Learn it yourself.

 

[medstudent99]

i would say to teach her/him englishyo first then after he/she has mastered Ingles then maybe think of Espanol because otherwise your baby will just be confused. this is coming for a 3rd generation Hispanic American person-age kind of guy. yeah i still do not speak mexican LOL! i still ain't even got proper grammar down. it's no accident hispanics are bilingual and do poorly in or poorer then counterparts in school. keepingt two languages balanced in your head is HARD!

 

[jocg27]

i would say to teach her/him englishyo first then after he/she has mastered Ingles then maybe think of Espanol because otherwise your baby will just be confused. this is coming for a 3rd generation Hispanic American person-age kind of guy. yeah i still do not speak mexican LOL! i still ain't even got proper grammar down. it's no accident hispanics are bilingual and do poorly in or poorer then counterparts in school. keepingt two languages balanced in your head is HARD!

I completely disagree with this idea, and honestly as a 2nd generation Hispanic American myself, I find it disturbing and even rather insulting, even coming from another. I hope that something is going entirely over my head, and your post is in fact a rather distasteful joke.

The reasons many Latino children perform poorly in school are far more multifactorial than 'they've got two languages balanced in their head.' At all levels of education, some of the highest achievers are bi- or multilingual and grew up hearing and speaking a language other than English at home. As I see it, suggesting that Latino children do not perform well in school because they are somehow unable to handle the strain of hearing one language at school and another at home brings up and perpetuates some very ugly ideas, especially in light of the fact that anybody can recognize that many if not all medical school classes are have a very sizeable representation of students who have found great success in the American school system, despite speaking a wide array of European, Middle Eastern, and South and East Asian languages in their homes and with their families.

Being bilingual will NEVER hold a person back. Knowing more languages and being able to communicate effectively with more people is NEVER a bad thing.

PLEASE do not listen to medstudent's advice. Although anyone can study a new foreign language, young children's brains are wired specifically for the acquisition and consolidation of language. A baby or young child is ready to learn language in a way that it never will be again. She may be able to study Spanish or another foreign second language again down the road, but if you start to make it part of her life as early and often and often as possible, you have the opportunity to let Spanish not be a foreign/second language...It can truly become her language along with English; she can take ownership of it and learn it and speak it and know it inside and out and love it in a way she never will in SPAN103 or whatever in high school. This ability to be bilingual, completely bilingual, with two languages that you can truly call your own, would be a wonderful gift that will serve her well through life. Not many people have that gift...I really hope you don't hold it back from her so she doesn't become 'confused.'

 

[watermen]

i would say to teach her/him englishyo first then after he/she has mastered Ingles then maybe think of Espanol because otherwise your baby will just be confused. this is coming for a 3rd generation Hispanic American person-age kind of guy. yeah i still do not speak mexican LOL! i still ain't even got proper grammar down. it's no accident hispanics are bilingual and do poorly in or poorer then counterparts in school. keepingt two languages balanced in your head is HARD!

I can understand 5 languages...and I am in a US med school, but I am not hispanics.

 

[lungdoc]

I think there is a lot of data that shows that learning 2 or 4 languages at the same time is neither hard nor confusing when you are young. And I mean young. The younger, the better. The time is right now. Don't wait to master one language and then teach the other.
Now as far as adults that is more difficult and depends on many factors that are not the case in normal healthy children.
I spoke and understood 3 languages by the time I was 5 and the ones that followed were definitely more difficult to learn.

 

[Stitch]

I work with a number of hispanic bilingual families and I tell them the same thing: speak both languages to them. Kids are much smarter and receptive than we are. They're little sponges, and will soak up both languages easily. The ealier the better.

 

[pillowhead]

I believe I read a study once showing that children growing up bilingual show some delay in each language initially but quickly catch up and have normal language skills in both. I would absolutely try to raise your children bilingually if you can and resent that my parents didn't with me. (Dad is trilingual--grew up in the middle east with one english parent who barely spoke the native language and went to french catholic schools.)

 

[Jejton]

I once read an obituary for the man who had the record for fluency in languages - he was fluent in over 100 languages and proficient in many more. His advice ( and he was a professor in linguistics as well I believe or something similar ) to parents who want their children to learn more than one language was be consistent. What he meant was that speak as many languages as you want but make sure that each person is consistent in the language spoken - mother speaks English, father speaks Japanese, grandfather speaks Spanish, etc. - until the child is at least 2 years old. At that point, he said, children can start differentiating between languages and wont have confusion. Before 2 years old, the child will not be able to differentiate between the spoken languages and will treat them all as one language.
I grew up in a bilingual home and am grateful for it. We have a 9 week old baby and agreed from the start that I would speak my mother tongue and my wife would speak English. I also ask that my family speak to our baby only in our mother tongue. If you meet Europeans, especially older ones, you will see that many of them are fluent in half a dozen languages. If anything it helps expand brain power, not the opposite. I agree with the above poster who stated that many Hispanic children are faring poorly in school to reasons other than the bilingual background.

 

[newenglandgal07]

I have a friend who speaks English and Spanish, and her husband speaks Norwegian. Her son is 3, it took him an extra year to start speaking (she thought he had a learning disability), but now he speaks 3 languages!!!! consistency is key, watching spanish language cartoons helps, and Norwegian cartoons in his case.

 

[f_w]

We are trying to raise our little one bilingual. It is really hard to stick with speaking my mother tongue to him while using english for everything else. When I grew up, we had many kids that grew up bilingual and they had no problems with it.

 

[windycitygirl]

i would say to teach her/him englishyo first then after he/she has mastered Ingles then maybe think of Espanol because otherwise your baby will just be confused. this is coming for a 3rd generation Hispanic American person-age kind of guy. yeah i still do not speak mexican LOL! i still ain't even got proper grammar down. it's no accident hispanics are bilingual and do poorly in or poorer then counterparts in school. keepingt two languages balanced in your head is HARD!

the children actually aren't delayed; on average, if you total up the number of words the child knows (i.e. 20 by age 2, etc) the bilingual children have approximately the same number. in addition, as everyone else said, it is much easier to learn the languages at a younger age. I learned my parents' mother tongue (AND english, thank you very much) because my parents spoke to me in that language from an early age. English--they'll pick that up in school, on tv, and with friends. teaching your child your mother tongue is one of the greatest gifts you can give them, and a link to their culture. I always aggressively promote it with my bilingual families! The information from the previous poster is completely erroneous.