The Benefits of Being Bilingual

*I’m a Marisa Bono fan. She kicks serious butt as a Latino Civil Rights litigator, and is just as passionate about being a mom. Lots of moms and dads out there will relate to this. VL

By Marisa Bono, NewsTaco

“Mamá, donde está el rombo?”

My two-year old son “Papito” and I were working on a shapes puzzle this week when he looked up at me with an urgent question. He was asking where something was…but what? I had never heard the word “rombo” before.

I asked him to repeat himself, and he said it again, with more than a hint of exasperation: “ROMBO, Mamá!” It was the first time he had used a Spanish word that I didn’t know. Looking down I saw an empty diamond-shaped space on the puzzle board, and the missing piece was nowhere to be found. A-ha! So “rombo” means diamond.

Not long after Papito’s second birthday, my husband and I made the deliberate decision to enroll him in a local Spanish immersion preschool in downtown San Antonio.

My husband was born in Mexico, so he speaks Spanish fluently, which comes in handy with his clients in his immigration law practice. Me? Not so much! My parents grew up in South Texas and were punished for speaking Spanish in school, so they didn’t speak Spanish to my brother and me growing up. As a result, my own Spanish is closer to Spanglish—a mix of Spanish and English, at best. My husband and I knew before Papito was born that we wanted him to be bilingual (if not multilingual), and that his early years were critical for language formation.

But when we first began looking seriously at Spanish immersion preschools, I was flooded with doubt. Would we cause language delays for our son? Would he be able to start Kindergarten school-ready? Some well-meaning friends even asked if we were worried about “confusing” him.

After some Type A, Mama Bear internet research, fastidious interviews with other moms who chose bilingual or immersion programs, and even quizzing an expert in one of the education lawsuits I happened to be working on at the time, we decided to take a leap of faith…and have seen our son flourish.

So, here are some benefits of bilingual education that I both read about and observed in our son during our Spanish immersion experience.

DEVELOPMENTAL

Research shows that bilingual education can actually improve the brain’s “executive function,” or the system we use for planning, problem solving, and multitasking. I saw this as recently as yesterday when Papito and I were taking a walk near a construction site (he’s obsessed with tractors). He saw an excavator with a huge, tonged scoop at the end. He said, “Mira, Mamá, son uñas!” (“Look, Mom, they are fingernails!”). He didn’t know the words, so he used his existing vocabulary to describe them. Not bad for a two-year-old!

LEARNING

Research also shows that bilingualism can enhance a child’s listening ability. It shows that in a noisy environment, bilingual kids are better at detecting different sounds, enhancing their attention. I have already noticed that Papito has a knack for identifying and mimicking song lyrics. I am convinced this is a result of his bilingual education.

SOCIAL

We were at dinner with some of my husband’s clients one evening. One of them was a refugee from Central America and had been through a horrible ordeal with her children: two boys who were close to my son’s age. They hadn’t seen their father in many months and were somewhat shy and withdrawn. When we introduced Papito, he switched to Spanish immediately, and within a matter of minutes the boys were happily playing with each other like old friends. My son drew them out of their shells without even trying. Language is a social tool, something Papito will always have in common even with people from completely different geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In today’s increasingly global and diverse workplace, we hope that language will also be a professional tool for him one day.

CULTURAL

In our case, Spanish is a direct link to our culture and family, since we are Mexican-American and half of our family on my husband’s side still lives in Mexico. We hope to send Papito to visit Mexico when he gets older, the way my husband and his brother visited their own cousins when he was a boy. Spanish will allow Papito to take meaningful part in the life of two or more cultures.

Today our son is almost three, and he communicates comfortably in both English and Spanish, precisely what my own parents were punished for when they were not much older than my son. We’ve come a long way. I realize “rombo” is probably the first of many words that my son will teach me, and I’m looking forward to learning more.

This article was originally published in Alamo City Moms Blog.

Marisa Bono is a civil rights litigator, passionate about education and immigrants rights. She grew up in San Antonio, Texas, and lives close to downtown with her husband Andres, an immigration attorney, her tenacious 2-year old son, a gentle rescue dog named Quixo and a “big boned” tuxedo cat named Sancho Panza. Marisa looks forward to sharing the highs and the lows of what she affectionately calls the “controlled chaos” that is her life as a full time working attorney, mom and wife.