When Children Learn Spanish
What is Happening to Their Brain?

When our children learn Spanish along with any other language proficiently, they are enhancing their abilities to interact and make friends across cultural groups, improving their metalinguistic awareness, enhancing their skills for creative problem solving, and becoming more creative. Overall they are gaining greater advantages over monolingual children.

We want our children to bilingual in Spanish today in the U.S. because of many reasons, but some of the most common ones include the future need for it given the growing Hispanic population in the U.S., the need to prepare our children to participate in a world economy, the need to give them a cognitive edge, and so on.

What Happens When We Raise Our Children Bilingual in Spanish?

When I started reading about the different reasons many parents in the U.S. gave on why they are raising bilingual Spanish English children, it was obvious to me that parents who are not born in Hispanic culture want this additional language to provide a cognitive and a professional advantage for their children.

The cognitive edge is reflected on higher levels of creativity and higher mental flexibility according to a study conducted by Peal and Lambert in 1962. Additionally, bilingual children have higher levels of metalinguistic awareness in comparison to monolingual children.

Jill Kerper Mora, Ed.D. at the San Diego State University, defines metalinguistic awareness as "the ability to view and analyze language as a 'thing,' language as a 'process,' and language as a 'system.'" It is simply that children who learn a second or third language know that language is a system they can study and play with.

How is that advantageous? You may ask. The answer is that children who have a higher level of metalinguistic awareness:

The Best Way Is Still the Natural Way

Many of our children learn Spanish without knowing the great advantages that come with the process.

Many Hispanic parents who teach Spanish to their children do so at home as part of a normal daily life with one or both parents introducing the foreign language. Other children learn Spanish by attending bilingual schools which is less common.

I have encountered many Hispanic parents who don't speak English fluently or feel more comfortable in their native tongue therefore Spanish becomes the favored language at home. Without knowing, these Hispanic parents are giving the best opportunity to their children to learn the language by interacting with them in Spanish.

Give a Cognitive edge to Your Children by...

Raising Them Fully Bilingual Spanish English. Let's be ware, it is factual information that children who have high levels of proficiency in both languages, in our case Spanish and English, posses the cognitive advantages of bilingualism.

When children learn Spanish and English fluently they gain the edge, therefore we as bilingual Hispanics or even monolingual Spanish speaking parents can give our children an incredible advantage by simply using our mother tongue to interact with them on a daily basis.

Here is my favorite part, when our children are bilingual they also gain better cultural understanding. What does it mean? It means that being bilingual Spanish English give our children the ability to have better understanding of other cultures and better behavior towards them.

The world is moving towards multiculturalism and globalization therefore there is a great need for interaction with other cultures. Rising bilingual in Spanish children can definitely enhance tolerance and cultural understanding. Part of the reason why we are in such deep trouble around the world is because we lack tolerance and understanding of other cultures.

Think about it, multiculturalism is growing tremendously in today's society, especially the U.S. which has always been a country of immigrants. When our children learn Spanish and English we give them better skills to deal with cross-cultural understanding and sensitivity towards others.

There is no doubt, when we raise children to be bilingual we are probably enhancing their opportunities to become more successful in a constantly changing world.

How to Help Your Bilingual Child - Further Reading