A bilingual child

I am currently visiting my family in Colombia, the country of my birth. 

In La Calera, a small town near Bogotá.  All of my cousins loved and adored Desmond and spoke to him solely in Spanish.  At my request. 

I lived here until I was about 4 years old, when we moved to Miami Lakes, Florida.  My mother, a Dominican by birth, and father, a Colombian, spoke both English and Spanish.  However, for the first four years of my life, I was raised by people who spoke to me solely in Spanish.  Although I've spent the last 26 years of my life speaking English (I learned through a mixture of my mother speaking it to me, preschool, and Sesame Street), I still hold on to my Spanish (although not as well as I'd like to).  I hardly ever use it day-to-day.  Sometimes, months go by before I speak to anyone in Spanish.  However, once I start using it in conversation, it comes back pretty quickly.  Even though the general idea is that if you don't use it, you lose it, I believe that for children who learn to speak a different language when they're young (before the age of five), this doesn't apply to them.  It applies more to the likes of those kids who have to take a foreign language in school and never use the language outside of class.

This is how I remember some of the kids in my high school foreign language class.

That's why we made sure to hire a nanny who would speak only Spanish to Desmond, so that he would constantly be exposed to the language, instead of having it forced down his throat by the mandate of a school board superintendent.  Since I speak Spanish as well and since almost all of my relatives speak mostly Spanish, I feel that Desmond will continue to use it throughout his life.  I plan to expose him to other languages as well as he grows older.  Even if he doesn't completely master, say, Japanese, researchers have shown that just being exposed to it in early childhood will help the child grow and develop an "ear" for it later on in life.

Furthermore, data from studies have shown that bilingual kids, although not necessarily smarter than monolingual kids, have different learning capacities and processing and are better multitaskers.  Dr. Bialystock, a professor of Psychology at York University in Toronto, says the following about bilingual children:

As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.
But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.
If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

 She also states that being bilingual can also help ward off Alzheimer's Disease.  Many parents believe that teaching their children more than one language at a time from infancy can result in language development delays.  This is what they told my mother about my youngest brother.  (I'm not sure if she completely quit speaking to him in English, but I know that he can understand Spanish a little bit and speak it even less.  I'm sure it's a remnant from the years my mother and step-father spent speaking to him in Spanish.)  However, research has shown that this is simply not the case.  Both monolingual and bilingual children achieve basic language milestones at approximately the same rate.

If you decide to start early and to teach your baby or tot a second language, it is important to realize that you cannot adequately instill the basic tenets of Spanish, French, or Mandarin via DVDs, books, or CDs.  Language acquisition occurs when the baby or toddler is provided with consistent face-to-face time with a person speaking that language.  Although part of my knowledge of English comes from Oscar the Grouch, I was also spoken to and read to a lot in English by my mother and my teachers at my Montessori preschool. 

My part-time English teachers.  "One button, two buttons, threeeee buttons!  Ha Ha Ha!"

For more information on raising bilingual children, go to the page for the Center for Applied Linguistics.