Tania Zulkoskey first contacted me in July 2012, when her fraternal twins were three years old. She and her partner were having some challenges setting limits for the children, and we talked about possible solutions to the situation. We spoke again a few months later via Skype and were able to come up with strategies to help Tania and her partner manage the children’s behavior and limit setting. I was so excited to meet Tania in person at the Multiples […]
Category Archives: Parenting
An Embarrassment of Riches
In the last few weeks, countless media outlets have reported on the increase in twin births. The latest CDC 2014 data reveals that 33.9 out of every 1,000 births resulted in twins. While 135,336 twins were born in 2014 compared with 138,961 born in 2007, a record percentage of twin births occurred. This statistic is substantiated by the fact that in 2007 only 32.2 per 1,000 births were twin births that year, reflecting that rates for 2014 were actually higher. […]
I Can’t Say It Any Better
I have often remarked that parenting multiples involves expansive scheduling along with enlightened thinking. The following article describes how a mom of triplets came to recognize and appreciate what her daughters needed and how she made sacrifices to accommodate each of them. It originally appeared in Multiples of America’s Notebook magazine (Fall 2015) and is reprinted here with permission. WHAT I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN By Sherry Santa, Higher Order Multiples Coordinator, Multiples of America Six years ago if […]
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, […]
Monkey Time: Alone Time at Its Best
I wanted to share one father’s enthusiastic endorsement of the benefits of alone time—time when one twin gets one-on-one parental attention. He shared his story with a group of parents I spoke to in San Francisco, prefacing his remarks by apologizing that he did not learn about one-on-one time from my book Emotionally Healthy Twins! He and his wife and their fraternal twin daughters coined the term “monkey time” to initiate time alone when the girls were toddlers. The father […]