To Be or To Ser?

Since the last couple of months I've seen myself facing the possibility of creating a family with my boyfriend. He is north american, and this has made us talk a lot about the way we will race our children once we have them. We have decided the names and the place they'll be born (cuz I've found out that I won't be able to have just one girl :S), but we don't seem to agree in deciding the language they'll speak. I vote for Spanish and he votes for English. Then I say: their classmates are going to make fun of them if they don't speak Spanish properly, and he answers that their going to be make fun of them in the US if they are americans who don't speak English.
Being bilingual myself, an English teacher, I should be all the way up for having bilingual children, but I'm a bit afraid that my future children may get confused with so many languages in their head. That's why I've made some research and I've found out some pretty interesting things that have helped me and may helped you (if you are in a similar situation) to decide whether raising or children bilingual or not.
I've found out that to raise our children as bilingual or even multilingual in South America (especially in Chile) is not as easy as some people may like to think. This is due to three main reasons: the first one is that most of children raised as bilingual have the real need to know other languages owing to the geographical location of the place where they are born, and the lack of popularity of their own languages. The second reason is that in almost all succesful cases of children raised as bilingual, one of the parents is a native speaker of a language while the other parent is a native speaker of another language, or in some cases the child lives in a country in which the language is neither the native language of the mother nor the father's, so they need to learn a third language in order to communicate with their peers. Finally, the third reason in most of the successful cases is that the person in charge of the infant (a nanny, an au pair, or a grandparent) is a native speaker of a different language and he/she transmits unconsciously his/her native language to the youngster.
South America, or the American cone, is formed by thirteen countries from which twelve are Spanish speaking countries. The geographical isolation of this part of the American continent from the rest of the world, allows us to speak Spanish and to understand each other with no communicational problems. In addition, Spanish is the third language most commonly spoken in the world. For this reason there is a sense of no real need to learn a second or third language as mother tongues as it is in some other places of the world. Although learning a second or third language is positive, we find ourselves with several cons due to the aforementioned, when trying to teach a child a second language from birth. And despite the fact that one of the parents may be a native speaker of the aimed foreign language, the child will find himself/herself in a strange position when he/she starts playing with peers and finds that his/her second language is not understood. Consequently, the youngster will feel different from his/her playmates, which will make him/her reject the second language and stop using it at all. Also, in South American countries, to speak a second language is an admirable quality for adults, children who have it, unconsciously distanced from their peers, or their peers see them as "weirdoes" and distance themselves from them. No matter what the case is, they are isolated from the group.
Also, in spite of the growing Globalization, it is still truly difficult to find couples in South America with different mother tongues. If none of the parents are native speakers of the language they are trying to bring up their child in, it is certain that they are going to fail at doing it. The pressure for the child will be to strong and he/she will give up. Moreover, if none of the parents is a native speaker of the second or third language, the child will get confused unnecessarily, since the youngster will learn the mistakes that the parents make in that language, and also, he/she will imitate the sounds his/her parents make and will be tinged with a strong foreign accent. It is also accurate to mention that the infant will take longer to start speaking; studies have shown that approximately 91% percent of bilingual and multilingual children take from 3 to 7 extra months to start speaking. Then, it is also important to inform that they will mix all languages they have acquired while speaking approximately until the age of 7, and while writing until the age of 12. Finally, South American economy cannot support people to hire nannies or au pairs who speak a different language. Therefore, in South America is rare to find a caregiver influencing an infant's language, and since the caregivers are very relevant in the child's acquisition of a second or third language, this point cannot be considered for South American realities.
After all of these discoveries, my boyfriend and I have decided that we'll try to raise our children as bilingual cuz we do have at least two of the variants that have made possible in other cases to raise children as bilingual successfully. However, if our children at some point of their lives decide that they want to drop one of their languages we are going to let them without a protest, cuz then we will know who's more popular as a parent (I'm sure it'll be me) :P