Government
An Alarming Number of D.C. Kids Suffer 'Linguistic Isolation'
Living in a household where adults don't speak much English has economic and academic consequences for children.
Sapna Pandya grew up in a multi-generational immigrant household in Montgomery County, Maryland. Both her parents worked, so her grandparents looked after her. Outside the home, Pandya would broker all interactions for her grandparents—translating back-and-forth from Gujarati because they barely spoke English.
"What it does is that it flips the dynamic," she recalls. "It makes it so that you really have to grow up pretty quickly."