Katie is an identical twin who has just graduated from the University of Gloucestershire in Gloucestershire, England. Her dissertation is entitled “My Twinship Journey: A Study that Explores How My Twin Sister and I Use Our Language to Express Our Identities in Relation to the Membership Category of Twinship.” Her research highlights their ongoing differentiation as both sisters confront and work through issues of identity and separateness. Katie describes how language choice and speech intonations recorded in separate interviews with […]
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Selective Mutism in Twins
A few weeks ago I came across a terrific article about the treatment of selective mutism in five-year-old male twins written by a prominent psychologist named Dr. Katherine K. Dahlsguard. She is the lead practitioner of the Anxiety Behaviors Clinic at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In the case described in the article, she astutely ruled out a language disorder in the twins, explaining that the boys exhibited normal language development as toddlers. Additionally, she pointed out that idioglossia—the technical term for […]
FOMO
I had no idea what my children meant when I heard them saying that their friend suffered from FOMO. They explained the definition of the acronym as “Fear of Missing Out.” This anxiety about missing out on something popped into my head after I listened to a mother of six-year-old twins equivocate about her decision to send only one of her daughters to a ballet class. The daughter who had expressed an interest in taking ballet told her mom that […]
Running Out of Time to Be a Twin
A seventeen-year-old fraternal twin girl whom I will call Mia contacted me to talk about the challenges she and her sister may encounter when they attend separate colleges in the fall. She described her relationship with her sister as very close, sharing extracurricular activities, friends, and interests. They are the only children in the family. Last summer, they separated for the first time. Although Mia felt strange being without “her security blanket,” she related that it felt fantastic to be […]
Sizing Up the Competition
Competition among siblings is integral to most families. Our natural instinct is to survive and thrive. Many twin pairs, however, have a different experience with sibling rivalry and competitiveness because of their intimate relationship. While twins fight just as much—or possibly more—than nontwin siblings, their feelings about surpassing or outdoing their twin can be conflicting and confusing. More often than not, identical twins that compete in the same sport are wholly supportive of and noncompetitive with their sibling. Often they […]