Tips for Raising Bilingual Kids | Superholly

Can you guys introduce yourselves, please? My name is Josiah Nigel Justice Whitley. And what about you? My name is Sheffy Crowley. My name is Shirley Whitley. Oh, great! And what language do you guys speak? Everything. No, you don't know everything. ¿Qué idiomas hablas, Josiah? ¿Y con quién hablas en inglés? ¿Con Tia Holly? Y también puedes hablar español y en inglés. Así es. Somos bilingües, ¿verdad? ¿Y ustedes qué idioma hablan? Cabeza en francés y en inglés. En francés! Cabeza en francés. Muy bien! Y cabeza en inglés? Head! What other languages do you speak? English and Spanish! English and Spanish! Hi guys, I'm Heather and as you know I'll be taking over Holly's channel today. I have the privilege of being Holly's sister and she is an amazing sister. And I also get to be mom to three gorgeous children whom I am raising to be bilingual. Today I'll be sharing five tips to help you raise bilingual children and I hope that you find them helpful. Tip number one, decide how you will raise bilingual children. The first part, deciding, is important because bilingual children rarely happen by accident. Unless you live in a country that has bilingualism at its core. I live in the United States and I am teaching my children Spanish, which is my second language. This was pretty intimidating to me because I like being eloquent and I feel frustrated when I'm speaking a language that isn't my best language. But at the same time, I love being bilingual and I really wanted my children to be bilingual There are three main strategies that people use for raising bilingual children, and so I'd like to tell you guys a little bit about each one. The first strategy is called Minority Language at Home. Now, when I say minority language, I mean the language that you don't hear as often out and about in the community. The language that you hear most often in a country is called the majority language. So English is the majority language where I live, and minority language is the language that you're trying to introduce. I grew up bilingual. My family lived in Mexico. My parents, they were bilingual, but they spoke to us in English, and I spoke to all my siblings in English. When I went to school, I heard Spanish all day long. So I was able to learn both languages from native speakers, which is wonderful. My husband, Jordan, and I live in a country where the majority language is also our first language. So, in order... To teach our children Spanish we've had to choose our second language to speak with our children in the minority language at home model. We vary from it a little bit, but that's our main goal. A lot of experts caution against raising your children in a language that's not your first language. One of the reasons why is because our emotions are more closely tied to our first language, and parenting requires so much emotional communication as well as verbal. Another reason why experts recommend that you only speak your first language to your children is That it's really important for children to have at least one language that they speak really well. And if you only expose them to a language that you don't speak well, that can be a challenge to them. It can make it harder for them to learn a second language. But after considering these challenges, I still wanted to have bilingual children. And so my husband and I have chosen to use our second language primarily at home. We do sometimes switch into English. when we need to communicate something and we can't attach the right emotion to Spanish. Another popular method for raising bilingual children is called one person, one language, O-P-O-L. In this method, you have different adults in the child's life who speak to the child exclusively in a specific language. This method can be very useful for families that want multilingual children. So you might have a grandmother who speaks only Spanish to the children, perhaps the father. The mother speaks only in French to the children and the mother speaks in English to the children. Many children around the world successfully grow up to be bilingual and multilingual with this strategy. The last strategy that I'd like to discuss is called Time and Place. In this strategy, you choose a context where you will speak the minority language exclusively. For example, you might say that at dinnertime you will always speak Spanish and the whole family speaks Spanish during that time period. Or perhaps you would say, while we're playing at the park, we will always speak Spanish or always speak French, whatever the minority language is for your family. Whichever one of these models you want to follow, think through what would work best for your family and then do your best to stick with it, regardless of which strategy you What do you use for teaching? The minority language, make sure that you're creating a need for the language. Your child needs to know that this language is important, that it's not an imaginary language made up by their parents, that this is a language spoken by other people in the world, and that they need to be able to survive. My second tip is to look for resources to give your child the highest possible exposure to the minority language. Two resources that have been super helpful to a lot of parents who are raising bilingual children are books and apps aimed at home communication. There are people who have their masters that know how to talk about all sorts of things in English but don't necessarily know how to teach a child to tie his shoes in English. MamaLingua is a great app. That teaches a lot of basic phrases that can be used in the home in English and in Spanish. So if you're learning Spanish and you want to know how to say, are you sleepy? I like it because it's great to be able to hear someone say these phrases. Try to get as many books as you can get your hands on in the minority language. If you live near a library, check out their children's section for foreign languages. You might find some great books. Some of the books that we've checked out at libraries, we've ended up putting on our wish list. I'm going to give you links to those books in the description of the video. This book, Pío Píp, has been wonderful for me. I love nursery rhymes. That hurt. This is one book that we have really loved. It has traditional songs and rhymes in Spanish and it has an English adaptation. This one my mom did sing to me when I was younger. I love the math in it. Dos y dos son cuatro y cuatro y dos son seis. Seis y dos son ocho y ocho es dieciseis. Anyway, I love the illustrations in this book and I love having that emotional connection that comes through those poems. If you are teaching your children English, I would like to recommend A Treasury of Mother Goose and this is the book that Holly and I loved reading when we were little and through the rhymes in these pages, I fell in love with words. I learned so many words from these rhymes because they're so old, but I learned them As a child. So that's been really neat. When I hear a word that's not used very often today, often I'll connect it to a rhyme that I used to read when I was a kid. Sometimes when I'm reading a book with my children, I find that I'm learning new words right along with them, and that's great. The word for dock. When I hear that word now, I think of a story, and it really helps me remember that word that I might not have otherwise remembered. Online, I love referencing wordreference.com. It's an excellent dictionary when it comes to really understanding how to say a word in a new language. If you take, for example, the word bolt. Bolt can mean so many different things. It can be like a screw, but a bolt. It can be a lightning bolt. It can be used as a verb, she bolted out the door. It can be used for cloth, a bolt of cloth. Google Translate. It does an okay job, but WordReference really does a great job of categorizing each use of the word and giving examples, and it also has a forum where people ask each other questions about languages, and I've really gotten great stuff from there. Also, sometimes I use Google just to search for a phrase and to see if it's common. So if I'm trying to figure out how to say hold the door open and I might guess, well maybe it's ten la puerta abierta, so I might Google that and see how often I see that phrase show up in documents written by native Spanish speakers. And in this day and age, we have so many audio books, videos, DVDs, YouTube. So many options that really make it easy for us to expose our children to a variety of native speakers of the minority language. When I'm buying a DVD, I'm always careful to get one that has Spanish audio so that I can switch it over to Spanish. I love finding cartoons on YouTube that are in Spanish and there are some great ones out there. Some of the programs my kids like to watch in Spanish are Pocoyo, Toys on the Go, Didoo, Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom. They have that in Spanish. I don't know if I said that right. And la gallinita pintadita, those are all great resources. I'll be sure to list a few of those in the document that I've linked to. I also find it helpful... Are you getting tired? I also find it helpful to keep a running list of words that I either need to look up or want to understand better. And so here I've got a list of words that I need to learn how to say better in Spanish. Dent, bend, rod, ajar, lock. I also have a list of words here that mostly end in E and Z and I can never remember whether they're masculine or feminine so I went ahead and wrote those in there with color to help me remember. One of the most important resources that has helped me I have made into its own tip and that is build a community of support. First of all, have a strong team with Your partner with the other adults in your children's lives. I am so thankful for my husband who started learning Spanish when he was 13 and has joined me in this adventure and is using Spanish quite a bit with the children even if he does mix in some English from time to time. It's great to meet people in your community who speak the language that you're trying to teach your children. It's also nice to find some communities online and so I'd like to name a few communities that have really helped me a lot. The first is a Facebook group called Raising Bilingual Multilingual Children. This group has people from all over the world who share their struggles, their triumphs, suggestions, pitfalls of raising a bilingual family. I've really appreciated that And also, I'm in another group called Non-native Speakers Raising Bilingual multilingual children and that group's been great too because it's just great to to talk with other parents who are really working hard to keep their second language strong enough to to teach it to their kids. From the second group, I've joined a WhatsApp group and there are parents who are trying to teach their kids English, who are native speakers of Spanish, and parents who are native speakers of English trying to teach their kids Spanish and we ask each other questions all the time and it's been great. We often have very similar questions to each other and it's great to be able to help each other out. And it's great to hear from the parents with older kids who are having success. Nope. Okay, Jordan. My fifth suggestion is to find strategies for getting back on track if you find yourself losing your focus or not meeting your goals. This one's so important because raising bilingual children isn't easy, and sometimes we feel like we're not succeeding and we might want to give up. I'd like to share a few creative strategies that I've heard of. One parent was frustrated that her children were speaking English, which was the majority language and not as much Russian, so she told them, if you want to fight, you have to fight in Russian There's no fighting in English allowed in this house. She found a way to either minimize fighting or minimize English, but either one of those she was okay with. Another parent shared a beautiful story where she was trying to teach her daughter Swedish, and her daughter did not want to speak Swedish with her. One day her mom brought home a kitten, and she said to her daughter, This kitten is just a little bit homesick. But this kitten doesn't speak English, so I'm going to ask you, can you talk to her in Swedish? It'll help her feel so much more welcome, and it'll help her feel a little bit better since she's so homesick. The daughter was like, oh, okay, I can speak Swedish to the kitty. As the weeks went by, the daughter got more comfortable with Swedish again, and eventually opened up to speaking to her mom in Swedish. With my own kids, there have been times where my oldest son, who's now five, has started to speak more and more English and has answered me in English when I speak to him in Spanish. And so I got tired of telling him, please speak Spanish, please don't speak English to me. And so I started talking to him in French. Now, I do not speak French. My children do not speak more than five words in French. But if he would ask me, where's dad, I'd say, je ne sais pas. And then he'd say, what? And I'd say, If you don't speak French, how about we just talk in Spanish? That might be easier. And for some reason, I don't know why, but that helped me stay positive and not feel like a nag. It felt more like a game to me to kind of... Coax him back into speaking Spanish. Reach out to your community if you're feeling discouraged and get that encouragement, and then find a creative way to get your kids to start speaking the minority language again. Well, those are my five suggestions for raising a bilingual family. I believe that raising bilingual children helps create harmony between different cultures, and that's something pretty amazing. When I talk about having a community of support, it's really helpful if you have a partner who's on board with you, because being bilingual changes a lot of things about the home. Jordan, I wanted to interview you a little bit because I'm super proud of the effort that you've made to have a bilingual family. Thank you. I'm Jordan, by the way. Anyway, hi all the people who started following me on YouTube without any content. Jordan, how did you learn Spanish? I did Spanish for five years throughout middle school and high school. Highline public schools, yeah. There was a little bit of immersion, but not a lot. Short trips. Short trips. Now, when we met and started dating and got married, I hadn't really decided at that point that I wanted to speak Spanish only to the kids. I guess I wasn't thinking about kids at all at that point. Yeah, you were. We kind of didn't really continue a lot of speaking Spanish as a couple, but I was so impressed with how it went once we started speaking Spanish with our children. Can you say a little bit about how that was for you? Sure, in just a minute. How much Spanish do you speak in the home? No sé. I typically don't come out of nowhere speaking Spanish to Heather. Sometimes. Usually it's with the kids. I will try to be mindful to switch to Spanish, which is kind of funny because they'll follow right along, or Acacia or Josiah will have a thought that works better in Spanish for them, and so I'll answer when they ask me something. But usually if they ask for something in English, We're also trying to teach manners, so they'll start with, I want this, in English, I want milk. And I'll respond with, ¿Cómo se piden las cosas? Por favor, papi. Por favor, ¿qué? Por favor, yo quiero un vaso de leche. Ok, eso es. Gracias por usar sus buenos modales. So, I'm trying to back Heather up in switching to it for conversations whenever possible. And one of the big challenges is that command forms in Spanish are very complicated. Jordan had been working super hard at speaking only Spanish to the children, but when they hit about two years old, I said, you know what, Jordan? If you need to switch to English to communicate to the children, switch to English and communicate to the children. That helped a lot because there was a lot of times where I wouldn't know how to say it, and it's like I need to be able to express this to the kids in the moment. I don't know how to say it in Spanish yet, so I needed it to be okay to say, do this or don't do that. In English, yeah, especially negative imperative, not something you learn first year, you know, second week in high school Spanish, as I've improved or remembered more, to have it come more naturally to just bark out, don't do that, stop cutting your sister's hair, something like that, starts to roll off the tongue, sadly, more naturally, and had no idea how important, how incredibly germane to my life that would become until we had children. Especially more than one. I feel like speaking Spanish in the home has really helped you keep the Spanish that you already knew and maybe add... Well, you've added a lot of vocabulary to it since then. Yeah, I mean more about food and diapers than ever before. I had lost a lot of it and it's been over the last... Five, six years that I've really started to get it back. And it's been thanks to having a walking gorgeous reference. I mean, I'm still terrified to like talk to actual Spanish speaking grownups and like out in public or at a restaurant or taco truck or something. But I'll try. I wanted to brag about Jordan and also tell you how we've had to adapt the minority language at home model because Again, you have to be able to communicate with your kids, and so if your language isn't at a level where you can say everything in the minority language, just switch to your first language, and try not to mix it too much, if possible. Just give yourself that discipline. And if you can't say a full sentence in the language, learn how to say a full sentence in the language. I think that that can be really helpful for kids so that they know which language is which so that they can know how to, you know, if they're speaking with a monolingual person, it's really helpful for them to know how to speak only in the language of that monolingual person. That'll come too. Like Josiah didn't know English from Spanish right away, but, you know, he started code switching. Like, he started breaking up full sentences, English or Spanish, or following along with what we'd speak. And eventually we got to work into the, this is how you say it in English. Eso es como se dice en Español. Así se dice en Español. Así se dice en Español. If nothing else, take away from it, you're not breaking them. It'll help. Now that Josiah is five and a half, there's no evidence of delay from him having started speaking late, because he was trying to process two languages. All three of ours have been a little bit later than normal, at least for U.S. English speakers. For first... for monolingual speakers. For monolingual speakers. They've been a little bit lower with first words. The words have come later, but... Now they don't stop. So there's that. Yeah. There are so many benefits to being bilingual. Being able to talk to people from other countries, being able to travel more. And I'll tell you this, knowing that Jordan spoke Spanish definitely made him more attractive to me. Hey, hey. So... I'd love to hear in the comments where you're from, where you're living, and what language you're teaching your children or what language you'd like to teach your children. Thank you for your time. Don't forget to watch all of the other awesome videos that Holly has in English and Spanish and náhuatl. Framing test to see if I actually like, you know, fit in the picture. Hi. Can you fit in my picture? You heard it here first, folks.