To all you parents who wonder where learning Spanish fits into the grand scheme of things, I'm here to remind you of one simple fact...being bilingual means more money!
Imagine your child looking for work in a few years (or more) and having double the opportunities and a higher salary to boot.
That's what awaits the bilingual candidates for jobs in the United States.
The U.S. Census Bureaus latest figures show that 41.3 million Spanish-speaking people live in the United States, and 102.6 million are expected to live here by 2050.
The hispanics are right now an ecomonic force in this country that every corporation and Mom and Pop business need to handle if they want a piece of the pie.
If your son or daughter can help a bank or insurance company connect with the hispanic population better than a monolingual candidate for the same job, they win.
They get the job and a higher salary because they learned Spanish and the other person didn't.
And it's not just businesses who feel the need to pay bilingual workers more. Law Enforcement agencies are so desperate for officers, dispatchers and administrators who know Spanish that they offer per-paycheck additional incentives that can make your head spin.
An article on Salary.com, a company that specializes in providing salary and compensation surveys, reports and statistics to employers, states that "Language differentials typically range between 5 and 20 percent per hour more than the base rate."
But there's more at stake here than the money. Just like the Baby Boomers were the last generation who found it possible to get a good job without being able to use computers, today's twenty-somethings may very well be the last generation who will find it possible to find a good job without being bilingual. And learning Spanish is at the top of the list in the US.
Your child will enjoy the cultural advantages of understanding and communicating with another culture and they'll leverage this ability to find the job that they want in an area of the country (or another country) that they want.
That's why it's so important that your child learn Spanish while they're in school. The younger the better. Experts agree that the younger a person is, the easier it is. Plus the more time they have to learn and speak Spanish before entering the job market, the better their language skills will be.
Just something to keep in mind when your child begins to say that learning Spanish isn't that important.
Jim Sarris is the author of Comic Mnemonics, a Spanish book that uses visuals and funny phrases to help kids learn Spanish faster. Visit http://www.learnspanishfaster.com to pick up some free samples and a free video tutorial.