Lauren Sánchez said she's taking Spanish lessons with her kids because her 'biggest regret' is not being fluent in it

• Lauren Sánchez said she missed out on her grandmother and mother's Spanish conversations growing up.

• Sánchez, the fiancée of Jeff Bezos, said she's now taking Spanish lessons.

• "It's something I crave," Sánchez, a third-generation Latina, said.

Lauren Sánchez, 54, said she regrets not being fluent in Spanish.

Leading up to National Hispanic Heritage Month, Elle published a conversation on Monday between Nina Garcia, the editor in chief, and Sánchez.

When Garcia asked her what it was like growing up as a third-generation Latina in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sanchez said it was "amazing." However, she said she missed out on her grandmother and mother speaking Spanish all the time, which prompted her to take Spanish lessons as an adult.

"The biggest regret I have is not being able to speak fluent Spanish," Sánchez, a former news anchor and a helicopter pilot, told Garcia. Her mother's decision not to teach her the language was to prevent her from having an accent. "She thought that would hurt me," she said.

"Now I am taking Spanish lessons, and my kids are taking lessons, because it's something I crave," said Sánchez, who has a son with the former NFL player Tony Gonzalez and two teenagers with her ex-husband, Patrick Whitesell.

When asked whether she bonds with her fiancé, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through their respective cultures, Sánchez said, "We bond and clash in the best possible way."

She said Bezos, whose father is Cuban American, only puts sugar on churros, while she adds cinnamon and chocolate sauce. "It's little things like that," she said, adding that they celebrate Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, together every Thanksgiving.

In July, Sánchez discussed her Latina identity with Eva Longoria in a conversation in The Hollywood Reporter.

"You and I are so proudly Latina. But we're also proudly American. And we are super assimilated. But we grew up with this hyphen, living in two worlds. And I think many people relate to that, especially Latinos in the United States," Longoria told Sánchez.

The benefits of bilingualism

Though most Latinos in the US can speak some Spanish, 65% of third or higher-generation Latinos surveyed in a 2023 Pew Research study said they struggled to hold a conversation.

However, 78% of the total survey respondents said it was not necessary to speak Spanish to be considered Latino.

Still, knowing two languages has benefits. Melissa Wells, an Afro-Latina American, previously wrote about her family's choice to raise her as a bilingual and realizing that her fluency in Spanish allowed her to stay close to her Mexican family and communicate with her grandmother, who has Alzheimer's.

Similarly, Conz Preti, a mother of three and an editor at Business Insider, wrote that she wanted her children to be bilingual because of all the opportunities it had given her. She only speaks to her children in Spanish, while her husband speaks to them in English. By the time they were able to talk, they were bilingual.

Scientists say bilingualism also gives its speakers cognitive benefits. Mariano Sigman, a neuroscientist and the author of "The Secret Life of the Mind," previously told BI that people who are bilingual have better cognitive control than those who only speak one language.

Cognitive control refers to the ability to control thoughts, be attentive to a conversation even if someone else is speaking, and persist even when you feel tired, he said.

"So it's, in a way, like being pilots of our own existence," Sigman said.

Sánchez didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside business hours.

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