If you've ever been told to "just stick to English" because your child has a speech delay, you're not alone — and you were given bad advice.
For this episode of Bilingüe, I sat down with Nichole Carrasquillo-Stumpf, a Latina bilingual speech-language pathologist with over a decade of experience supporting bilingual children and their families. Nichole is the founder of Topi Topi Bilingual Therapy, a Doctor of Speech-Language Pathology candidate at Northwestern University, the author of Vocabulario Boricua, and a mom raising two bilingual kids of her own.
This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Watch it here, or keep reading for the highlights.
Raised between two worlds, now raising bilingual kids of her own
Nichole was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Puerto Rican parents who'd only been in the States a few years. The home was Spanish-only — Spanish at the table, Puerto Rican food on it, and books her grandmother mailed from the island because Spanish-language books simply weren't available where they lived. At seven, the family moved back to Puerto Rico, where Nichole went on to complete both her bachelor's and her master's degree.
"I didn't feel fully from the States when I was here, and then in Puerto Rico it's like, well, you weren't born here, so you're not really Puerto Rican. I grew up in those two worlds — being part of both, but none at the same time."
Nichole Carrasquillo-Stumpf
After grad school, she moved to the Chicago area, where she met her husband — half German, half Czech. Today they're raising two bilingual (and a little trilingual) kids using one parent, one language: Nichole speaks Spanish, her husband speaks English, and her father-in-law adds German to the mix.
What actually makes a speech-language pathologist "bilingual"?
Every SLP completes the same base training: a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in speech-language pathology. What separates a bilingual SLP isn't a different degree — it's everything layered on top of it. Near-native proficiency in both languages. Specialized coursework in what's typical versus atypical in Spanish language development specifically, not just English. And a working fluency in the parts of assessment that get complicated fast: which standardized scores are even valid for a bilingual child, when dynamic assessment is the better tool, and how to avoid mistaking normal bilingual development for a disorder.
There's no national certification that guarantees this. A handful of states, like New York, offer a bilingual SLP credential. Illinois doesn't. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has a self-reported checkbox clinicians can use to mark themselves as multilingual — but real expertise comes from continuing education and lived clinical practice in both languages, not a box on a form.
What to look for in a bilingual SLP for your child
Best practice is straightforward: in a perfect world, you find a clinician who's bilingual in your child's specific home language — Spanish, Arabic, Polish, whatever it is. For Spanish-English families, that's a more findable match than for lower-incidence languages. If a language-matched clinician genuinely isn't available, a qualified bilingual SLP still has the tools to assess a child accurately, even without speaking that exact language — it's just not the ideal scenario. The question worth asking a prospective SLP isn't just "do you speak Spanish," but how they were trained to evaluate bilingual development specifically.
Why shared culture changes the clinical relationship
Language match is only part of it. Nichole has seen, repeatedly, how cultural context shapes the entire conversation with a family — particularly because stigma around diagnoses runs deep in many Latino households, and self-blame is common when a child is found to have a delay.
"Knowing the cultural context, I come in from a different lens than some of my co-workers, who come in with the data and say, 'Señora, we've noticed these things, your son needs help' — and the parent recoils, gets defensive, says no, no, no, they're fine."
Nichole Carrasquillo-Stumpf
Where Nichole can step in and speak to a parent directly, in their own language, the dynamic shifts immediately. Her first move is almost always the same: this is not your fault. From there, the conversation becomes about shared goals — what the family actually wants for their child — instead of a clinician delivering findings to a parent who feels like she's being judged.
The myth that won't die: "Stop speaking Spanish so they don't fall behind"
Here's the misconception Nichole says she still hears constantly, in 2026: families who were told — by a pediatrician, an early intervention provider, or a speech therapist without bilingual training — to drop Spanish entirely once a delay was identified. The reasoning is usually framed as practical: progress will be faster, it'll be less confusing, it'll be easier if everyone just works in one language.
It is not research-based. Bilingualism does not cause speech or language delays, and dropping a home language doesn't accelerate progress in the other one. For many of these families, English isn't even the language most of the household speaks — meaning the advice doesn't just lack evidence, it can cut a child off from the language they need most to communicate with the people raising them.
If your family has been given this advice, the actual options look different: you can keep working in both languages, or shift the *ratio* if that's what's right for your child and your goals — but stepping away from your home language was never the only path forward, and it was never necessary to protect your child's progress.
The real model: parent and clinician as a team
The shift Nichole works toward with every family is the same one she wants more clinicians to make: she's not there to be "the expert" handing down conclusions. She has the clinical training. The parent has something equally essential — the deepest, most specific knowledge of who their child actually is.
"I don't want to be the expert. I have the knowledge, but you are the expert on your child. My goal is that we become team members, instead of me being the expert from over here telling you things."
Nichole Carrasquillo-Stumpf
In practice, that means parent education is a core part of her work — translating clinical findings into plain language a family can actually act on, so they understand not just what a delay means, but what to do about it: read more, narrate more, focus input in a specific area. The goal isn't compliance. It's a parent who walks out of the room as an informed, active participant in their child's development, not a bystander waiting for instructions.
Up next in Part 2: we get specific about Spanish — including why rolling your R's takes longer than you'd think, and what's actually typical at each stage of development.
ABOUT NICHOLE
Nichole Carrasquillo-Stumpf, M.S. CCC-SLP, is a bilingual (Spanish/English) speech-language pathologist with over a decade of experience supporting bilingual children and their families across Illinois. She's the founder of Topi Topi Bilingual Therapy, providing bilingual speech-language evaluations for school districts, professional development for educators, and mentorship for new bilingual SLPs. She is currently pursuing her Doctor of Speech-Language Pathology at Northwestern University and is the author of Vocabulario Boricua, a bilingual children's book celebrating Puerto Rican Spanish. Nichole is mom to two bilingual kids.