During one of my recent talks to a Moms of Multiples group, I asked the audience to help me understand why organizing alone time with each twin can be an emotional hurdle. One woman related that alone time with each twin interferes with family time, especially during the weekends, when full-time working parents can spend time together with their children. Another woman shared her concerns in a delightfully humorous way. She explained that her well-intentioned, engineer-minded husband was not the […]
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Pedagogy or Pathology?
Following my radio interview on KQED in San Francisco, a listener wrote an email chastising me for propagating unnecessarily negative views about twin development. Moreover, my colleague Dr. Nancy Segal also expressed a similar viewpoint by stating that statistics show that twins are no more at risk for mental health issues than anyone else in the population. She, too, seemed uncomfortable about my desire to highlight adult twin challenges. While I am well aware that most twin relationships are healthy […]
Three Twinship Myths: Setting the Record Straight
In 2015, Dawn Van Osdell from the online magazine UrbanFamily approached me for an interview as part of their Myth Busters series. UrbanFamily has graciously allowed me to share the resulting article about demystifying the twin mystique. 3 Misconceptions about Twins, Busted! Dawn Van Osdell There’s a lot of contradictory and downright erroneous parenting info floating around out there. We’re not afraid to tackle it head-on! Societally, we have a fascination for twins, likely because they used to be a pretty […]
Getting Back into the School-Year Swing of Things
Betsy Brown Braun is a child development and behavior specialist, parent educator, and author of Just Tell Me What to Say and You’re Not the Boss of Me. She has graciously allowed me to share this terrific back-to-school blog post from her website (August 3, 2018). Smooth the Start to the New School Year 2018 Betsy Brown Braun Just thinking about the start of school can be stressful for kids. New teachers, new classrooms, new friends, new expectations, new routines. On top […]
Three Traumatized Identical Strangers
The documentary Three Identical Strangers reveals the story behind the uncanny, mystical reunion of nineteen-year-old identical male triplets who had been separated at birth. The details of the boys’ adoptions are horrific—the boys and their adoptive parents were deliberately uninformed about the boys’ siblings, and the adoption agency collusively conducted a secret experiment on nature versus nurture variables using adoptees. Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent child psychoanalyst at the time and the head of this experiment, was a proponent of […]