According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 18 percent of U.S. residents speak a language other than English in the home, an increase of 75 percent since 1990. The numbers are staggering, though most don't need statistics to understand that the world is getting smaller with each passing day. Learning a second language has become a requirement within many educational institutions, a necessity for businesses large and small and a key to a variety of cultures and countries.

It can also be a difficult struggle – unless you happen to be a 3-year-old. Strange but true: Your newborn has a better chance of becoming fluent in a second language than many highly educated adults.

Primed for Learning
"Between birth and age 8, your child's brain is uniquely hard-wired to absorb languages and to learn to pronounce words with a native accent," says Stacy DeBroff, mother of two and author of The Mom Book: 4,278 Tips for Moms by Moms (Free Press 2002). "Children learn languages very differently from adults, with studies finding that children even store a second language in a different area of the brain." DeBroff, a former Harvard lawyer who also runs Mom Central, Inc. and the www.momcentral.com Web site, understands the benefits of children learning foreign languages on a neurological level as well as a social one.

DeBroff says it is never too early to start teaching children a foreign language. When most parents are concerned only with comprehension of English, they fail to understand just how incredibly children's brains function. "The earlier children start learning a second language, the better, even as early as 1 year old," she says. "Many teachers and linguists recommend starting the language learning process as soon as possible, even before children become verbal in their first language. Even though children are not speaking at that point, they are actively absorbing and processing language."

In much the same way, Ana Flores learned English. Flores, who now lives in New York, was born in Cuba and came to the United States at the age of 2. Although she quickly learned English at school, Spanish was the only language spoken at home. "I am fully bilingual and feel that has only been an asset for me during my academic experience and thereafter professionally," she says. "My husband was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and he speaks Spanish fluently. We feel that it's important to keep that going for our children. With the way the world is now with everything global, it can only be beneficial for her. We also want to maintain our culture and language."

It is also important for Flores' daughter to be able to communicate with her extended family, some of whom still live in the Dominican Republic, while others closer to home may speak only broken English. "We do not want the language to be a barrier," she says. "It is important to us she be fully bilingual. Based on everything we learned and read it makes sense to do it now rather than waiting. We felt it would be more difficult or confusing if we waited."

Foreign-Speaking Sitters
In order to start instilling the use of Spanish, Flores sought a very talented nanny who agreed to only speak Spanish to her young charge. "A lot of the books we read to my daughter are in English, and television is also in English," she says. "We knew she would pick the language up regardless, so we wanted to do something where she would feel almost forced to speak Spanish and keep that going. She knows who she needs to speak to in what language, and with her babysitter she knows she has no choice [but to speak Spanish]."

Now, Flores is amazed at how well her daughter speaks both English and Spanish at the ripe old age of almost 3. "She pronounces things better in English than in Spanish," says Flores. "She picked up the English faster than the Spanish, but she is definitely a conversational speaker – as much as a child can get who's not quite 3."

The key is in the daily immersion of the Spanish language. Flores' nanny talks her daughter through whatever they're doing. "The sitter was a teacher and ultimately a principal for many years back in her country, so I think she has the professional experience in dealing with small children," Flores says. "She teaches letters, colors and numbers."

Flores and her husband are in the midst of figuring out what the next move is for their daughter: keep their sitter or look into a daycare which offers Spanish-speaking caretakers. "It's time for her to start interacting with other children," Flores says. "We have considered daycare or preschool as a very likely option, but we don't want her to lose the momentum she has with the Spanish."

Claudia Bloom and her husband have likewise relied on a few foreign-speaking sitters since their son's birth. Their son, now almost 8, was first exposed to Spanish as an infant, but the family chose to not aggressively teach him a second language until he was older. As an infant, the use of Spanish was not an issue, but as Bloom's son started to get a little older they asked their sitter if she could use some Spanish in his presence.

The decision was not an easy one to make, and Bloom was admittedly a little nervous about the shift. "My husband was very interested when he was 2 and 3, but I was very concerned about him using English and Spanish at same time," she says. "My feeling was if it wasn't our native language, he would just get confused."

Bloom and her husband waited until their son was almost 5 and fluent in English before they asked their nanny to start integrating Spanish into conversations. At first self-conscious because she had worked so hard on speaking English, the sitter soon learned to incorporate her native language in everyday life. "In between kindergarten and first grade, we asked to make it part of his day," she says. "We bought flashcards and workbooks to help her, and she turned out to be a wonderful teacher."

Story time implements basic vocabulary, and the sitter has created matching games with words and pictures. Despite some initial resistance, Bloom's son has come to understand questions in Spanish and has started to incorporate the language into his routine with the help of some fun nightly prompting from his father. His knowledge of Spanish has become an incentive of sorts for watching a favorite TV show. "As a new mother I was worried that he was not going to learn English, that he might be confused," Bloom says. "Now looking at it, if I had to do it again, I may have been a little more aggressive about it and start around the age of 2."

Help With English
Bloom's fear that Spanish would only serve to confuse her son's understanding of English is a common worry. However, DeBroff says the lessons learned in another language may help youngsters to grasp the first. "Parents may wonder whether learning a second language before your child has yet to fully master English will detract from his learning ability," she says. "To the contrary, learning the roots and structure of a second language typically enhances your child's English. As long as children hear these languages methodically and regularly, they can learn more than one simultaneously."

Learning a second language can help children grow and develop in cognitive, language and social development, DeBroff says. The more language learning there is, the more cognitive development there is. "The more languages a child is learning in the early years, the longer it will take him to speak, but once he starts speaking, he will speak in all the languages he knows," she says. "The receptive learning part of the language development process takes longer because the understanding process of two or more languages takes longer. Socially the child is enhanced, because he will be able to relate to people from different cultures. He will acquire more experience with different kinds of people – It is important to understand how truly beneficial it will be for their child to speak and understand easily and comfortably in more than one language."

"By 6 months, children in English-speaking households already have developed different auditory maps, shown by electrical measurements, that identify which neurons respond to different sounds, from those in Swedish-speaking homes," she says. "This is why learning a second language after, rather than with, the first is so difficult. The auditory map of the first language restricts the learning of a second language."

DeBroff says that while children engage in fun activities in a foreign language, such as singing, story telling or cooking projects, they naturally take in and start to use the new language comfortably and effortlessly. But this natural talent for learning language has a shelf life. As children approach puberty, neural connections develop, and the nature of language learning and storage changes becoming less flexible, DeBroff says.

"Between the ages of 8 and 12, studies have shown that children lose the ability to hear and reproduce new sounds resulting in a foreign-sounding accent in a second language learned," she says.