If you’re raising a bilingual kid here in the U.S., no doubt you’ve experienced this issue (or will at some point): your child all of a sudden refuses to speak Spanish.
Agh! The frustration! The confusion! Do you try to force it? Do you pretend you don’t understand English? Do you just carry on and ignore it? Have you done all of these things, like I have? 🙂
I anticipate that this could be something we experience more and more with our kids, though luckily so far it hasn’t happened tooooo often. But the other day, while casually googling “my child won’t speak Spanish” (as one does, haha), I found the most brilliant analogy that I just had to share here.
It comes from the research of Dr. Sabine Little, who works with bilingual families to see how they negotiate language policies at home. She thinks of the home language/minority language (Spanish in our case) as “Great Aunt Edna’s Vase.”
Imagine that Great Aunt Edna passes on and leaves her treasured vase to her nephew. All kinds of things could happen, right? The nephew could have exactly the same taste and love her vase because he finds it beautiful. He also could think the vase is rather hideous, but keep it because it reminds him of how much he loved Great Aunt Edna. Orrr he might not care too much for either the vase OR Great Aunt Edna, so he stuffs it in a corner somewhere and lets it gather dust. Finally, he may think it’s so atrocious that he gives it away immediately and never thinks about it again.
And that’s without taking into consideration what other family members might think and express about the florero!
So the moral of the story is that this inherited gift can be a source of pride, conflict, guilt, love or disregard. And that’s just a vase! Imagine how complicated feelings can get when the inheritance is not an object, but a language!
I’m working on a follow-up post with specific strategies on what you can actually DO when your kids won’t speak Spanish, but I thought this research was so interesting! Dr. Little found that parents often fail to talk with their kids about any complicated feelings regarding their bilingualism, which means that language could easily turn into a battleground for the family. I know I’ve seen that happen.
Now that we’re a year away from our four year old starting kindergarten and officially switching from a mostly-Spanish day to a mostly-English day, I’m trying to prepare for this elementary school phase that Dr. Little calls “a common point of linguistic rebellion.” Her best advice? Keep renegotiating language choice with children as they grow up, and talk as much ABOUT language choice and the home language as IN the home language.
I’d love to hear from you, what has worked in your family (or hasn’t worked at all?). For us, pretending we don’t speak English wasn’t an option because hello, our kids are no dummies. My best strategy so far has been either asking a question in Spanish to gently remind everyone what we’re speaking (“Mommy, I did a puzzle today at school!” “Ah, ¿y de que era el rompecabezas?”) or just straight-up saying “En Español, por favor” if my more subtle approach isn’t working.
Let me know in the comments what you do, and if you found the vase analogy as amazing as I did!
(Photo of the vase by @evelyntannus on Instagram.)
Honestly I’ve had to develop a sense of humor! My kids think I’m hilarious en español because I’ve had to make it fun for them. I’ve made homemade vocabulary picture games to play and I’ve also learned to do funny things. For example, when my kids are going potty they always leave the door open and I’ll walk by and shout random words in Spanish. They think it’s hilarious and they’ll walk around saying those phrases making each other laugh. I also do this throughout the day and say funny stuff in Spanish and I act stuff out and make funny faces. It’s exhausting but that’s what ever book I read told me to do and it works.
Hahaha that’s amazing! I’ve never heard that advice but definitely keeping it in mind. Being hilarious en español = new life goal. 🙂
Interesting analogy. Not sure how I feel about it honestly. Lol. I just get upset that my daughter completely disassociates herself from Spanish. (Insert heartbroken crying emoji face) She’s told me, “that’s not my language.” And I respond with “you know Spanish is the first language you spoke!” And we start going through all her first words. You know I’ve told you about my struggle but I’m finally happy that she’s been more open to it through TV and books and because she hears me talking to her brother in Spanish she wants to feel included and will say the few words she can remember. My lash solution is mandarla pa Mexico! Lol. No but really. Ha
Welllll it’s not a bad solution actually? Haha. I wonder if it will maybe be easier to reason with her as she gets older and really discover why she feels so averse to Spanish? Until then just remember that she’s still picking up stuff as a passive bilingual, and she can access that knowledge later if she changes her mind! Animo amiga!
My niece is four, her Mom is Hispanic, my brother just plain old white. We want my niece’s first language to be Spanish, so we always speak to her in Spanish. If my brother talks to me in English, my niece says, “Habla a Tia en Espanol x favor!” I LOVE IT!
Haha that’s awesome! They just love being the ones to remind you, huh? 🙂