Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood touches upon the many stressors of present-day parenting. The fear about giving our children more freedom to be outside the home is high on the list of parental conundrums. She writes, “By the time children get big enough to venture out on their own—to the grocery store, to a friend’s house down the street—their parents feel strange about letting them go, believing the world to be a […]
Tag Archives: multiples
Tired of Being a Twin Referee?
My identical twin sister and I frequently reminisce about our worst fight. Although we both remember the incident with slightly divergent perspectives, the upshot of the argument was that my sister ended up with a few broken fingers after I pushed her and she fell down onto the pavement. I believe we were about seven years old at the time. When parents seem surprised and dismayed about their twins’ incessant bickering, I wonder if they are under the spell of […]
Prepare to be Dazzled
“Prepare to be dazzled. . . . Multiples Illuminated will guide you through multiple madness with mindfulness, humor, and joy. Stories about real-life parenting experiences combined with sage expert advice will help you recalibrate the emotional equilibrium between the yin and yang of raising multiples—heroics and heartache, antics and agony, bliss and burdens.” This is a blurb that I wrote for a wonderful new book titled Multiples Illuminated by Megan Woolsey and Alison Lee. It is a collection of personal […]
Parents Know Best
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 […]
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 […]