Bilingual in Spanish?
My Experience and What You Can Expect the Process to Be

I won’t lie to you, raising a bilingual in Spanish child requires compromise, effort and patience from parents. Read on to learn how I have managed to make it enjoyable for my husband, our child, and myself.

Key to success?... to make your child think it is fun and a normal way of living. Very simple, make it enjoyable for both of you.

Raising a child to be fluent in Spanish in the U.S. today is definitely easier than it was a decade before. These days there are many tools and opportunities for our children to be exposed to the Spanish language.

If you ask me, the most important factor for raising a child to be bilingual in Spanish is the quantity of Spanish he is exposed to.

As a mother of a bilingual Spanish English child, I saw the difference in his Spanish language development when he started attending pre-k, a place where everybody spoke in Spanish. English became more prevalent, and I noticed his progress in Spanish started to slow down.

The slowing down of the learning process took a while to manifest, about 3 months. I spotted it when I saw he was stopping to think about the next word he had to use to communicate with me, the only one who speaks Spanish to him. When he could not find the right word in Spanish he simply used the English word for it. It was a wake up call.

I started researching to find ways to keep my son learning Spanish at the best pace I could provide. I wasted money and time finding the right resources to raise a truly bilingual in Spanish child, but you don't have to.

I looked into other resources even though we have always maintained a well stocked collection of books in Spanish, and some DVDs.

TV in Spanish was another avenue, but I particularly don’t like to sit my child in front of the tube. Knowing the environment we live in is predominantly English I realized he needed to be more exposed to Spanish.

It took a bit of effort to search through the many materials available to help you raise your children bilingual in Spanish. The top choices for me were and still are Spanish books, Spanish DVDs and Spanish games.

Spanish books are a wonderful way to help you raise your children bilingual in Spanish while helping you preserve your Hispanic culture. Reading provides an excellent opportunity to make children excited about learning to speak in Spanish because humans associate experiences with words, books, poems, etc.

DVDs in Spanish are a support system that helps the child reinforce language knowledge and increase his vocabulary. I found DVDs to be very good for teaching the child about differences and similarities amongst many Latin American traditions from people that come from different Hispanic countries.

By far my favorite tool for learning to speak Spanish is using Spanish games. These include Spanish puzzles, Scrabble in Spanish, board games in Spanish, matching words games, etc. There are many available on the market so evaluate them carefully as most of them may require your participation or guidance.

As bilingual toys go, I don’t see much value in many of them because they have very limited vocabulary; most of them don’t require more than pressing a button to make them talk. I think Spanish games, books and watching Spanish DVDs with your children are by far better tools.

Raising a bilingual Spanish/English child is like a wild ride, many moments are fun and exciting and some are hard and bumpy. It is all in how you take the ride and how prepared you are to make the most of it.