Hispanic Heritage Month begins today. Rather than mark it generally, we want to address one piece of advice that families in our community still receive — sometimes from well-meaning professionals — and that the research does not support.
The advice is: speak only English at home, so your child does not fall behind.
Who we are talking about
Hispanic children make up roughly a quarter of all children under five in the United States. Many are dual language learners — children developing two languages at once, typically Spanish and English.
Two facts about this group sit uncomfortably together. Dual language learners benefit substantially from high-quality preschool, arguably more than any other group. And Hispanic children, particularly Hispanic DLLs, enroll in preschool at lower rates than their white peers. Research on kindergarten entry has found math and reading gaps for Hispanic DLLs roughly twice as large as those for Hispanic children who arrive speaking English.
Read quickly, that looks like evidence that the second language is the problem. It is not, and the distinction matters enormously for what a family should do.
What the evidence actually says
The gap at kindergarten entry largely reflects an access problem — which children got into good early education — rather than a penalty for bilingualism. When DLLs attend high-quality programs, they do well.
More to the point, the home language turns out to be an asset in the process, not an obstacle. A 2026 study published in Developmental Science followed 471 Hispanic Spanish-English dual language learners in Head Start programs for two years, from program entry through kindergarten. It found that children's earlier Spanish vocabulary predicted their later socioemotional development — how they got along, managed feelings, and participated. The home language was doing developmental work, not competing with English for space.
This fits what the broader literature has found for years. Bilingual children often show advantages in problem-solving, cognitive flexibility, and attention-switching. And the professional consensus on instruction is not "English only" — it is strategic, intentional English interaction combined with use of the child's home language for teaching and connection.
Why the bad advice persists
It sounds intuitive. If English is the goal, more English should be better, and a second language looks like a distraction.
What that intuition misses is that language development is not a fixed-size container. What a child builds in one language — vocabulary, the understanding that words map to ideas, the ability to follow a narrative — transfers. A child with a rich Spanish vocabulary is not using up capacity. They are building the scaffolding that English attaches to.
There is also a real cost to the advice. When a family switches to a language the parents speak less comfortably, the quality and quantity of conversation at home usually drops. And back-and-forth conversation with an adult is the mechanism behind early language growth — the thing we point to when we talk about why staffing ratios matter. Trading fluent, rich conversation in Spanish for halting conversation in English is a bad exchange, and it can cost a child their ability to talk with a grandparent as well.
What we would actually suggest
- Speak the language you are richest in. Whatever lets you tell complicated stories, make jokes, explain why the sky does that. Depth matters more than which language it is in.
- Read in the home language. Books in Spanish build exactly the vocabulary that transfers. A library card is the cheapest intervention in early education.
- Look for programs that treat the home language as an asset. Ask directly: does any staff member speak my child's language, and how do you support home language alongside English? The answer reveals a lot.
- Expect English to come. Children in quality programs with consistent English exposure acquire it. The worry is understandable; the evidence is reassuring.
Why this belongs in Hispanic Heritage Month
Because the month is usually observed with food and music, and there is nothing wrong with that — but the more consequential thing happening in these families is a set of decisions about language, made early, often on bad advice, with effects that last.
The honest version is that a child's home language is not an obstacle to overcome on the way to English. It is part of what they are bringing with them. Our job, and any good program's job, is to build on it rather than ask a family to set it down.
