Entre Dos Podcast

Entre Dos Podcast is about raising bilingual children, and its name fits the ground it covers. Several episodes begin with a greeting that slides from 'Hola' to 'Hello', and Monica and Paula introduce themselves before a guest takes over. From there the show moves among research, family life, schooling and books. The research side belongs to Dr. Annick De Houwer, a professor of language acquisition and multilingualism at the University of Erfurt in Germany, whose 1990 book The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth is described on the show as pioneering work. Her long-running question is why some children who grow up hearing two languages use only one. The answers she gives are concrete. When a child comes home from a first school day speaking English, she suggests patience: let the story come out uninterrupted, then offer to help find the Spanish words for what was learned. With older children, she says, a parent can be far more explicit about why the language matters. Writer Masha Rumer supplies the lived version of that advice. She describes molding Play-Doh letters with a son who would make only the English ones and who, pressed for a Russian letter, threw the dough on the floor and left the room. His sister, meanwhile, calls Russian their special language with mommy. Rumer's takeaway is modest and useful: meet the child where he is. The conversation with the author of Generation Zero, a first-generation Indian American of Sikh descent, widens the lens to identity and to how immigrant stereotypes can leave a young person feeling they fit nowhere. It also turns to Latinx families whose children never learned Spanish because bilingual schooling was not available. Schooling gets a sharper look in an episode with Rosa Campos, one of the organizers of the Save Dual Language campaign in Naperville, Illinois. As pandemic reopening plans took shape, the campaign pushed for the local dual-language program to meet students' language and cultural needs, whether classes ran remotely or in person. The conversation raises the concern that children in the online academy could fall behind, and that one disrupted year could shape the program's next six. Picture books are another thread. Director Joanna Rudnick discusses her documentary Story and Pictures By, which examines three writer-illustrators, among them Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson, and describes picture books as one place where children have agency and rules can bend. The Cuéntamelo series, framed as more personal, began with Alicia of Maleta Books in an episode entirely in Spanish, and that conversation defends reading for pleasure alongside reading to learn. For a starting point, Harmonious Bilingualism: A Chat with Dr. Annick De Houwer offers the grounding, and the Rumer conversation offers a parent's-eye view of the same problem.