The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
We send our kids to a Spanish immersion public school. I'd say points 1-5 are all true at our school.
I'd also wager that you are underrating Spanish's "usefulness". Some pros:
Learning to read Spanish is much easier than learning to read English. My oldest (7) started reading Spanish first and that made reading English much easier. My next oldest (4) is just starting the reading process, and he can read much better in Spanish as well.
Lots of "fancy" words in English are "simple" words in Spanish. When my kids speak English, they use words like "prefer" (instead of like), "ignorant" (instead of stupid), etc and I regularly get comments from adults about how smart my kids sound. These adults then go on to treat my kids better.
Hispanics love to see a bunch of little white kids talking Spanish, and become "instant friends" with them. I'm sure Chinese speakers would love it just as much, but there's a lot fewer.
Since you said downthread you already speak some Spanish, you'll actually be able to help your kids learn. You'll also learn some yourself, which makes being with them more fun. Lots of parents complain about having to listen to The Wheels on the Bus 1000x as a parent, but it's much more fun if it's in a language you are learning and actually benefiting from the repetition.
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