My Sister

One of the things I'm very proud of the way my sister Vicky and her children raised their kids in the Unites States is how very early on,
they decided that their first language at home should be Tagalog. My sister, in her own words:

"If you go around Bay Point, you will hear small kids speaking in their native language.
The Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Mexicans are all good in teaching their children their mother tongue. This is true whether the kids were born abroad or here in America.
Go to a Filipino supermarket in Vallejo and you will notice that the Filipino kids will
be speaking in English. It is not very often that you will hear a small boy saying “Po” or “Opo”which is a Tagalog word for “Yes” full of respect. Me and my children decided before my grandchildren were born to teach them Tagalog. Another language is one of the best gifts that parents can give to their children. My criticism of Filipino parents is that they often say that it will confuse the child. It is my opinion that to do so is to undermine the potential of the child.
Relatives would also often say that once my grandchildren goes to school that their Tagalog speaking skills would disappear. I simply do not say anything so that I don’t sound like a smart ass.
I know that a bundle of tracts connecting the left and right hemispheres of the human brain, the corpus callosum, is still developing. It does not play in language development per se but the point I am trying to make here is that young minds are still developing, those synapses are being built for language development, and therefore, need to be introduced to positive tactile, visual, auditory and lingual stimuli. Another argument would be the previously mentioned ethnicities. Their children don’t appear confused to me. In fact, I see those kids as being smarter than those kids who only speak one language. There’s a lot of data to support these claims and if you are interested in raising a bilingual child,
the Multilingual Children’s Association is a good place to start. So how do you teach a child Tagalog?"