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Bilingual parenting
By adamg on Wed, 06/27/2007 - 11:40pm
Too hot to get within 20 feet of the kitchen tonight, so I stopped at Viva Mi Arepa in West Roxbury (Boston's best Haitian-owned Venezuelan restaurant, of course) for a couple of arepas and some rice and beans. There was a tableful of adults having dinner, a baby and a little kid. The adults were talking mostly in Spanish, with odd bits of English thrown in.
The little kid was bored. He started playing near the restaurant's open door. He inched out onto the sidewalk. And then his mother yelled:
Get adentro!
Or "Get inside" in two languages.
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Comments
That's the way to teach your
That's the way to teach your kids proper english... no wonder kids these days are retards.
Bilingual Kids
Usually I hear the parents speak to the kids in the native tongue and the kids respond in English.
what
My sister speaks to her children in both English and Italian. The best time to learn more than one language is while language is developing. So this child is probably going to grow up speaking two languages fluently...why is this bad now?
better example
I know a couple, one German and one American. They have two children. The baby doesn't talk yet, but the older one talks to Papa in German and to Mama in English and doesn't seem to have any trouble switching between the two. He did come out with "Ich will ein Buch please", but that's common among multi-lingual children, and there's no evidence that they won't be able to tell the difference.
Explain to me why bilingualism is bad?
IQs are up
Once lead was removed from paint and gasoline, IQ scores began to rise. There was some recent press on the possibility of re-norming the tests because the mean had drifted up. So much for "kids today".
Most billingual kids don't have problems using English properly, and some do a better job of it than their peers because they have to work at keeping it all straight. They do typically speak later than unilingual children, but they know multiple languages.
Being bilingual does nothing
Being bilingual does nothing but benefit children. It doesn't matter whether the second language is a "prestigious" dialect like Castilian Spanish or Parisian French or whether it's a language with creole elements, such as Puerto Rican Spanish (and its Spanglish variants that occur in people who've lived in the US for generations) or Louisiana French. Speaking more than one language opens up extra pathways in the brain and has been demonstrated to lead to better problem-solving skills and relational skills.
Hearing disability slurs, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to a child's ability to learn to relate to others. It's really unfortunate that you grew up in an environment where such behavior was acceptable.
What.. You never heard of a
What.. You never heard of a Latino HS student failing Spanish!
(cause of spanglish)
I kid! I kid!