I had the pleasure, honor, and good fortune to speak at the beautiful Teatro Raul Julia at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan. The museum is an incredible venue that offers a myriad of events for all ages on the island of Puerto Rico. Dr. Lourdes Ramos, the museum’s tireless executive director, has inspired the museum’s impeccable reputation for excellence and innovation. I stressed key points in my presentation that provoked thought and self-reflection. The first […]
Category Archives: Mental Health
Guatemala Dreamin’
I recently returned from a glorious ten-day trip to Guatemala. The idea of the trip was sparked about a year and a half ago though an Internet exchange I had with a psychologist from Guatemala City researching twin issues. Beatriz Cadena de Schwank was treating an eight-year-old twin in her practice and sought a consultation. She belongs to a private mental health group that she founded with six other women colleagues about five years ago. Their practice is called Proyecto […]
Heartbreak
If more people understood the complicated dynamics between identical twin girls, the public might be less inclined to treat them as a unit and lump them together. When I work with adult female MZ (monozygotic, or identical) twins, I am amazed and dismayed at their underdeveloped and unsophisticated knowledge of themselves and one another. Since they have had few opportunities to be separate and have primarily shared a peer group, they are shockingly unaware of their personality differences until an external event […]
Does Parenting Shift with Zygosity?
Dr. Nancy Segal published an interesting article in the latest edition of Twin Research and Human Genetics titled “Zygosity Diagnosis: When Physicians and DNA Disagree.” A portion of the article is devoted to a mother’s reaction upon discovering via DNA testing that her two-year-old daughters are monozygotic, not dizygotic, as she had previously believed. I am reprinting a paragraph from the article that quotes this mother’s response to this new information. I find what she says perplexing and incomprehensible. Instantly, […]
Can Your Twin Have a “Normal” Childhood If She Has a Special Needs Twin?
A mom recently wrote this about managing twins with different abilities: I have identical boys, but one will never be able to do everything his brother can, due to a brush with Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome in the womb. Although both are healthy, bright kids, their physical accomplishments will always be at a different pace, and as a result, I’ve had to mull this over many times. Thinking about this mom’s situation led me to learn more about how children with […]