Raising bilingual kids

People often do a double take when they hear my white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, 2-year-old say, “Quiero leche, por favor.”

They look from her to her father and me, who are also both blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and they wonder where this little Spanish-speaking toddler came from. We decided before our daughter was born that we wanted to teach her to speak Spanish, a language my husband learned on a church mission to Argentina and that I minored in during college.

My accent is horrible, I admit. I could not sound more like a white girl trying to speak Spanish. But my husband sounds great, so we decided he would always speak Spanish at home or when we’re alone with our daughter in public. I respond in English, and my daughter speaks to me in English and to my husband in Spanish.

The system isn’t always perfect, however. Our daughter still says things like “I want dos cookies.” The other day she even referred to a watermelon as an “aguamelon.”

Sometimes I worry that we’ve totally messed her up.

But when I see reports like this one from the Associated Press, I’m so happy that we followed through on our plan. A study by an international team of scientists showed that children are born with the ability to learn two distinct sets of language sounds. But by a child’s first birthday, that ability weakens and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish all the sounds unique to a foreign language. By age 7, the bilingual learning window is almost closed.

We did a lot of research on how to raise children bilingually, but I’m always eager to learn more. Have any of you raised your kids in a bilingual home? What methods did you use and what obstacles did you encounter?

(On a side note, thank you for all your kind words on my blog last week. Your words were comforting and it was good to hear that I’m not alone.)