Hola from New Orleans

Virginia, welcome! We're glad you're here and we'll do all that we're able to lend support and encouragement so you can move forward more confidently and effectively with your bilingual aim. (And, in fact, your children want to be bilingual, too, even if they're not aware of this desire yet! See pages 10-11 in my book!)

And please feel free to reach out to me personally, anytime, either through a private message at this forum or by email. I feel for your frustration and I want your family to experience the success that can certainly still be realized over the months and years ahead. (The same applies to all parents out there facing some difficulty on their bilingual journey!) 

First, let me strongly second Amy's helpful advice. I know Amy well and have such admiration for the efforts she has made over the past few years, and the progress she has realized with her girls, after her earlier struggles. Along with her thread at the Track Your Progress board and her blog, I also recommend the guest post she wrote at Bilingual Monkeys.

Virginia, I suggest that the place to start, for you and your husband, is with a concrete answer--a written plan, even--to this question:

At this point in time, what regular efforts are we able and willing to make that are sustainable?

Because that's the thing: As long as your efforts are sustainable--even if those efforts start small and are "minimal" compared to other families--you and your children will make progress over time. It's inevitable! And this is particularly true since your kids are still small! It's not too late! Whatever didn't happen before can still happen from this point forward. But you and your husband will need to let go of all regrets over the past and now come together as an invincible team of bilingual superheroes who are committed to seeing this quest through to the very end, no matter what.

"The truth is (see pages 73-75), the only way to really fail at raising a bilingual child is to give up entirely. ... In other words, you just have to go on, you just have to persevere--day after day, year after year--and progress is guaranteed. How could it be otherwise?"

Let me give you a concrete example of how progress can be made over time, even when the efforts made are "minimal."

In our case, English is the main minority language and so 99% of my efforts have been focused on nurturing my children's development in this language. (They're now 15 and 13.) About five years ago, however, we met a woman from Madrid who now lives in Hiroshima with her Japanese husband. Since that time, she has been teaching Spanish to my kids about twice a month for an hour or so. As I don't speak Spanish myself, that's largely the only Spanish input they've been getting, along with my efforts to keep them working through basic textbooks and watching Spanish videos on a fairly regular basis. But even though these efforts amount to only 1% of the total efforts I've made, my kids now have some basic ability in Spanish: they can understand quite a lot and can speak a little bit, too.

And "all" this required was sustainable habits and routines.

So I encourage you and your husband to sit down and create a concrete plan for your efforts moving forward. But it's very important, I think, that you begin with smaller steps and only choose to do what is 100% sustainable at this time. Success will breed success, you see, so even if you start at only one hour of "Spanish time" a week, and that's sustainable, that's still a far more effective choice than trying to do too much, too soon. What you want right now--what you need right now--is momentum that will carry you forward until these new efforts become embedded into a sustainable bilingual lifestyle.

And whatever habits and routines you put into place, you must make sure that these will be enjoyable activities for your kids. The objective is to not only provide language input, but to cultivate positive feelings toward the language, too. And this is done through fun experiences that can connect to the child's natural passions and interests.

Toward this end, I urge you to place a monster order for appealing Spanish books, music, games, and other resources that will enable you to engage with your children in this language. Flood your home with Spanish stuff! Without ample and entertaining resources, it becomes far more challenging to sustain our efforts. And, in fact, the opposite is true when we have plenty of fun resources: kids and parents then want to engage together in the target language by reading books, singing songs, playing games, etc. (See pages 147-153.)

Virginia, I hope this initial response is helpful! I'm cheering for you and your family and I look forward to hearing about your fresh, sustainable plan to begin taking small steps, on a regular basis, toward the long-term success you seek. 

Hi Virginia, and welcome to the Bilingual Zoo!

You've already had excellent advice from Amy, Adam, and Carrie; I'd just like to add that, when it comes to cartoons, I give priority to those that can be found in the US (which is where my daughter and I live), but instead of my daughter watching/listening to those cartoons in English, she watches them in Spanish (or German or French, which are the other languages that she's learning). She's only 4, but I thought it'd be a good idea if she could share her comments or ideas about cartoons with her friends and, most importantly, to know who those characters are! (if other kids talked about Vampirina, for example, I wanted her to know who she was).

I'm originally from Spain, and I check the "Clan TVE" page to see what cartoons Spanish kids are watching, then I try to look for them on YouTube. Similarly, I looked at cartoons from PBS, and I realized there were some that I could also find in Spanish, so...guess which language those characters use when she watches those episodes. 

It's pretty easy to find Disney shows in Spanish (YouTube is wonderful for that), and like I said, you can also find PBS cartoons in Spanish online, so that's what my daughter watches. Watching cartoons in Spanish doesn't mean that your daughters forget completely about what they have been watching so far, they can still watch most of that...but listening to the ml. I think it's a good way to make your daughters more willing to hear and (hopefully!) eventually use their ml. For example, we just found a new German cartoon that my daughter absolutely loves, and she's beginning to use more German because of that, so...again, God bless YouTube. 

Like Amy pointed out, it's not an easy journey, and it has its ups and downs, but...raising our kids bilingual/multilingual is definitely worth trying!

Marisa