A Conversation with Parenting Expert Maritere Bellas

As mothers of relatively young children, a lot of the conversations we have are about what will become of our bilingual, bicultural children’s future. For this episode, we called on Maritere Bellas, an award-winning author and parenting expert, who raised bilingual and bicultural children in Los Angeles, to share with us her wisdom and experience.

Maritere R. Bellas

Maritere has written extensively about parenting for newspapers and online outlets, and is the author of the books “Raising Bilingual Children: A Practical Guide,” “Arroz con Pollo and Apple Pie,” and “Luisito’s Island.” After we recorded this episode, she also launched a multicultural parenting podcast in Spanish called Mamás 411.

Additional resources

Our 2019 Bilingual Parenting Resolutions

Happy 2019! It’s the first full week of the year and we’re ready to get back to work. We’re also ready to continue traveling down this bilingual parenting path with our daughters and our small community of listeners and followers.

In our last episode, we shared the lessons we learned from seven months of recording the Entre Dos Podcast. It turns out that they also make good resolutions, so we wanted to share them with you here on the blog. We hope these five lessons will inspire you and motivate you in 2019.

Continue reading “Our 2019 Bilingual Parenting Resolutions”

Family Dynamics and Bilingualism

What does your bilingual family look like? Do you speak only the minority language at home? Do you speak both English and the target language? Do you speak English-only? In this episode, we explore how these family dynamics influence outcomes in bilingualism.

Joining us to discuss this is Dr. Anny Castilla-Earls from the University of Houston, and a group of parents raising bilingual children.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Annick De Houwer

ADDITIONAL READING

The Languages You Speak To Your Bilingual ChildPsychology Today, Oct. 24, 2014

One-Person, One-Language and Your Bilingual ChildPsychology Today, April 1, 2015

Frambuesa or Raspberry? Expert Anny Castilla-Earls tells us what we can expect from an emergent bilingual mind

Mami, quiero raspberries. Statements like these may make you worry about your child’s grasp of the language you’re working so hard to teach him or her, but much of what worries us as parents of bilingual children is typical of their development. What is expected bilingual development? And what can we as parents do to help our kids maintain the language?

Anny Castilla-EarlsAnny Castilla-Earls is an associate professor and researcher at the department of communication disorders and sciences at the University of Houston. Her research focuses on language development, assessment, and disorders in monolingual and bilingual children. She’s also mom to six-year-old bilingual twins and a passionate advocate for bilingualism.

Aside from telling us about her bilingual family, Anny shared her expertise on raising bilingual children.

Continue reading “Frambuesa or Raspberry? Expert Anny Castilla-Earls tells us what we can expect from an emergent bilingual mind”