Posts from the “Reflections” Category

Meeting Minutes

08/23/13

Do the Cohen brothers ever fight? Did Owen and Luke Wilson ever get into a scuffle on the set of Bottle Rocket or The Royal Tenenbaums? Has a Jonas Brother ever clawed at another Jonas Brother’s gorgeous face? I mean, we’re talking male, human primates here, with testosterone pumping into their veins and stupidity chromosomes weaved into their cells. Heck, didn’t Jesus himself go apeshit once on a bunch of money-changer jerks at a temple in Jerusalem? The two little male human primates that life has blessed me and entrusted me with are just as prone to bouts of irrational male physicality (i.e. fist-based conflict resolution) as any other great male human primate that’s ever existed. As a 37 year-old boy, I understand this, but…

Categories: Questions, Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

One More Year

08/08/13

How odd that every year around this time, each of my two boys becomes one year older. Ever since Pope Gregory XIII (whose name was actually “Steve”, or something like that) decided to go ahead and proclaim: “Guys, this is the year 1582 and that’s all that there is to it,” we thirty-something parents live to lament the dizzying pace at which the years fly by. When my first son was born, I ceremoniously took a blank journal that a dear friend had given me years earlier and resolved to use it as a “daddy journal” where I would record, in Spanish, my reflections about our growing together as a family; a journal that in the future I could leave to my boys as a…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Perceived Need

03/02/13

Do you think my boys give two hoots about Spanish being a beautiful, romantic language that might give them an edge when dating in the future? Do you think they care if being able to speak more than one language might make them smarter and more valuable to future employers/one-percenters/slave-drivers/overlords? Do you think that at ages 5 and 3 they comprehend the geopolitical and sociocultural forces at work in their heritage, when Skyping with their Abuelita and Tía on weekends just robs them of precious Lego-playing time?

Photo by By MS’s photos

No, they don’t care. What they do care about is that what little television they get to watch at home is comprised mostly (and as of late, almost exclusively) of cartoons in Spanish. And when you expose a boy to 40 minutes of “He-Man Y Los Amos Del Universo”, all he wants to do is get up off the couch, wield any broomstick or tennis racket as if it were a sword, and yell at the top of his lungs: “Por el poder de Grayskull!”. That, my esteemed readers, I recently learned is an example of what’s called “perceived need”.

Recently, I watched an impressive Google Hangout led by the brilliant ladies from SpanglishBaby where they and a group of other bilingual mothers discussed their experiences and tips for dealing with the “bilingual rebellion” stage – that point in a child’s development when no matter how much you’ve suffered to give the ungrateful little brats all your time, money, and what’s left of your wretched soul, they turn around and say: “No, thank you, I’m done talking your ridiculous foreign language”.

At some point in the conversation, Roxana talked about “perceived need” – the understanding that a child needs to develop (or be taught) about why speaking the second language is important. And as the moms discussed the different ways in which they approach this process, it dawned on me how different my experience is — as a Scandinavian recluse trapped in the body of a short little brown Colombian, I’m the first to admit that I haven’t provided as many opportunities as I could for my children to experience Spanish as a necessary language (other than putting them in a Spanish-speaking daycare, which has been great) . And being the attention starved man-child that I am, I took the liberty to share with the SpanglishBaby Google Hangout viewers my own experience: That the “perceived need” in our household is that my boys love, love, love super hero stories and super hero play, so making that hot commodity be predominantly available in Spanish, makes them surprisingly willing to play, speak, read, write, and watch in Spanish.

I realize I’ve written several times before (here and here) about this idea of play or role-playing in our family and how powerful a tool it’s proven to be to ensure that our kids practice and expand their Spanish. But it wasn’t until this week that I realized this is their “perceived need” – my boys want to play, they want to wrestle, they want to pretend they’re He-Man and Lion-O. Their perceived need came from within and it wasn’t taught or hinted at – it was kind of a happy accident. And I believe the role-playing element helps remove any awkwardness they might feel about not being as comfortable with Spanish as they are with English. It takes me back to my pre-teen years in Colombia when pretending to be Axl Rose from Guns ‘N’ Roses or James Hetfield from Metallica made me excited about learning their songs, speaking English when there was no one around to practice with, and pretending to be a bad ass rocker when in reality I was a short nerd.

So, my advice to parents trying to raise bilingual children: make the language an integral part of play: If your boy or girl wants to be Ariel, get the DVD of The Little Mermaid dubbed into the language you’re trying to teach; I’m sure you can find it somewhere on Amazon.com, on YouTube, or through other shady means. Make their favorite character an integral part of your play – pretend with them that you all are the characters from the movie, say the dialogue, expand on it, draw the characters together and talk about it, make up bedtime stories together that take characters from the story but take them to unexpected places and situations. In other words, give up your personal life and work on this, people. It pays off.

I’ll leave you with this long wacky story-telling session with my boys (they are telling me the stories). It starts with Gabe (age 5) telling me a story and running out of steam quickly, and then Sam (age 3) borrowing his brother’s characters and plot and making them his own, and then losing focus and telling the rest of the story while running laps and flailing his arms around the dinner table (not before letting us know that all children on earth will be eaten, which piqued his brother’s interest – “even me?!”). You’ll notice their difficulty with some words (where they resort to English), but overall, they perceive the language to be necessary to our storytelling, and we lose ourselves in the wackiness together.

Categories: Reflections, Tips

Stockholm Syndrome

01/14/13

Even in a family friendly and worldly metropolitan area like the Twin Cities, a parent can find himself in a bind. The long, dreary, cold winter can some times limit your options for kid activities, so when you’ve taken your children to the Zoo, the Children’s Museum, the Science Museum, and the indoor playground so often in recent weeks that your children threaten mutiny and the museum and the mall staff begin to recognize you and flash you a gaze of quiet judgement and disappointment, you have no option but to keep everybody home. But those extended periods of self-imposed house arrest can be a boon to bilingual upbringing if you can muster the energy and mental fortitude to do the work. Starting this past Thanksgiving,…

Categories: Reflections, Tips

New Treasure

12/05/12

Time flies when you’re having fun. Time also flies when you’re parenting. And parenting is fun much of the time. Please see the diagram below for the scientific principle behind this statement, and don’t read too much into the small overlap between parenting and fun–there is almost complete overlap (some times…). In the nine months since my last post, things have changed greatly so I’m not really sure where to begin. My last few posts included one dealing with the gut wrenching process of making our choice of kindergarten for Gabriel and how we went from my lazy assumption that our kids would go to a Spanish immersion school to a gradual realization that putting our kids in Chinese immersion instead, would position us…

Categories: Reflections

Feel the magic, hear the roar

03/29/12

In early 1987, an eleven-year old Colombian boy sat in a deep trance for sixty minutes, his consciousness overtaken by images of sword-wielding anthropomorphous cats, until the boy’s vital signs impressively hovered just above flatline numbers without permanent damage to nerves or tissue. At the end of the sixty minutes, the boy slowly regained awareness of his surroundings; he stood up and kissed his surrogate father (the television set) and thanked him for introducing him to the incredible adventures of the Thundercats. More than twenty-five years later, that boy would go on to write a blog post justifying parental laziness under the guise of proactive and resourceful bilingual parenting. OK, I’m back. Had to take a quick YouTube detour in the middle of writing this to…

Categories: Reflections, Tips

Get Smart

03/28/12

Referring to the inherent difficulty of managing multiple languages in your brain: “But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.“ – ‘Why Bilinguals are Smarter‘, The New York Times, March 18, 2012. Had I known about the whole “brain resolving internal conflict” part earlier, I would have started learning a third language years ago and saved hundreds of dollars in copays to my therapist (damn you, Dr. Carlson!). But let’s not go dark so quickly into the post. Many fellow writers in the bilingual upbringing blogosphere have written thoughtfully and eloquently about this and other articles that…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

The Bluff

03/14/12

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” — Confucius You must learn to see opportunity in every time every time your assumptions are challenged and life turns the tables on you. Oh, I just realized I made a typo on that last sentence–I meant wife turns the tables on you. For the four and a half years my beautiful bride and I have been parents, I’ve been following the tacit plan that our children will go to a Spanish immersion school. As a non-stereotypical male who’s not, however, free of a few stereotypically male traits, my modus operandi when it comes to big decisions about…

Categories: Questions, Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Monitoring

06/16/11

In the era of warrantless wiretapping, geo-location tracking, and 24/7 electronic surveillance, why should the Gonzalez household provide its youngest dwellers with any form of privacy? Especially when the surveillance not only alerts us when the mocosos are playing instead of sleeping so we can yell at them from the bottom of the steps, but also makes us privy to cute and tender moments between brothers? Early one morning a couple of weeks ago, before the damn sun began to rise at 5:00 AM and screw up our boys’ biological clocks and ruin our lives, my wife heard the following exchange between Gabe (our older son) and Sam (our younger son) coming from the baby monitor in their bedroom: Gabe: Sam, you’re my best…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

Chicken Soup for the Soul (but don’t throw away the head….or the feet)

06/15/11

This post is not for the squeamish or the narrow-minded: Still reading? Ok: Chickens are cute for about two days after they’re born. Then they start becoming these gnarly little monsters with red flaps of wrinkly skin dangling from the sides and top of their stupid tiny heads. That’s why we must pay homage to the first human who (one would have to assume, in the midst of a hallucinogenic trip) decided to take one of these winged monsters and combine it with some boiling hot water, a smidgen of salt, cilantro and oregano, a couple of potatoes and green plantains, and gave mankind the wondrous invention that is sancocho. Yum. But you know who really loves chickens? My mother. She loves them so much indeed (was it love…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences