» Network Home

Featured Guest Blogger November 9th, 2009

Cindy Krischer Goodman writes a weekly column called “The Balancing Act” that appears in The Miami Herald and is distributed to more than 40 other newspapers on the McClatchy Newswire. Her column explores the conflicting demands of balancing a career and personal life. She also is a contributor to MomsMiami.com, writes a blog called The Work/Life Balancing Act and maintains a website, TheWorkLifeBalancingAct.com. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

As a mom, I want my children to be bilingual. Why not give them every advantage when they one day enter the job market? But as a working mom, finding the time and making the commitment to teach my children a second language has been more difficult than I expected.

I’ve discovered that other parents are struggling, too. It’s Nia Yasher’s third go round at raising a bilingual child and this time she’s sending her daughter to a Spanish-language school. Yasher, a Cuban-American insurance agent in Miami, who grew up speaking Spanish in her home, has two older daughters who aren’t fluent in both languages. “Teaching our kids Spanish is hard for my generation,” Yasher says.

Today, working parents who grew up speaking Spanish, Creole, Portuguese, Hebrew and other languages have so much else on their plates that raising a bilingual child often becomes complicated, overwhelming and the chore on their to-do list that they let slide. In an era where most families rely on two incomes, working parents may have the desire to teach their children their native tongue, but lack the time and energy required to carry out their good intentions.

The recession is teaching us a lesson: being bilingual — even multilingual — is a huge career advantage and learning it as an adult is challenging. CareerBuilder.com has hundreds of jobs advertised in almost every industry seeking workers who are bilingual. There’s other incentives, too. Bilingualism has also proven to be beneficial for the cognitive development of young children, Jennifer Santiago writes for Babyzone.

As many bilingual parents know, the key to teaching a child a language is consistency. This is where I went wrong. Here in South Florida, where much of the population speaks more than one language, I had my oldest child begin life learning Spanish and English. When she started school, I had her tutored in Spanish. Even though she hears Spanish in the community, I didn’t keep up with it the lessons or practice with her and she has lost her fluency. As a parent who has struggled all my life to become fluent in Spanish, I feel guilty.

It’s that guilt that keeps Roberto Giuffredi of Step by Step Languages in Miami in business. Giuffredi says he’s been surprised by the demand since opening his language school seven years ago. Giuffredi has taught Spanish to about 600 children of Hispanic parents who typically have some Spanish spoken to them at home — just not enough to make them fluent.

Of the 53 million U.S. children between 5 and 17, about 15 percent are bilingual, according to the U.S. census 2008 American Community Survey. Several factors complicate parents’ efforts to raise a bilingual child. They include whether they are the first or second generation in the United States, whether both spouses speak the language, whether extended family are nearby to reinforce the language, whether the desire to assimilate is stronger than the interest in passing a second language on to offspring, and fear of delayed speech skills.

Of course, grandparents can be helpful. Ana Lopez-Blazquez says as the daughter of Cuban refugees she went out of her way to teach her two children her native Spanish. But her home has three generations under one roof, with grandparents who don’t speak English and reinforced her efforts while she was at work.

Jeannette Kaplun, co-founder and chief content officer of Todobebe.com,  a website for Spanish-speaking parents, says ensuring your child is bilingual requires mom and dad taking a tough stance. “The older they get, the more they prefer to speak back to you in English. They resist and you have to resist, too.”

Kaplun offers advice to working parents who feel overwhelmed: Listen to music in another language, watch Disney movies or cartoons, read books at story time, play games.  “It doesn’t have to be seen as a chore.”

Of course, there’s also Yasher’s approach, the one I’m considering again: outsource it. As Yasher notes, “At least with my daughter taking classes, I know she’s getting the basics.”

• Mothers and Fathers