I’ve been in Israel for the past week with my husband and 2.5-year-old. We’re here for a number of reasons, one of them to see family–my husband’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.–in all I think the immediate family here totals around 31.
So it’s fitting that this article I just wrote about why my daughter speaks more Spanish than Hebrew came out this week. Curious to hear from the rest of you who are also struggling to raise bilingual kids–how exactly do you do it? I need advice, please!
Here’s a bit from the Forward article:
The other night, I handed my daughter, Mika, a plate of chicken and carrots for dinner. She glanced at it momentarily before professing snidely, “Mama, this is not delicioso!” The declaration was remarkable for two reasons: The first was that I had made dinner, the second that my 2.5-year-old cracked a joke. Her hero, Dora the Explorer, calls everything she eats “delicioso” and everything she does “excelente”; the piece of schnitzel I made was clearly neither. Another amazing thing about this was that my daughter used a word in Spanish — correctly. Granted, we’re not raising her to speak Spanish. We are hoping for Hebrew.
