MULTIPLE APPROACHES
There’s no one set of rules to follow about how best to parent multiples,
Beth Jones is used to fielding questions when she’s out in public with her kids. Afterall, she’s a mom of not one, but two sets of boy-girl twins.
Sarah and Owen are 10 and in Grade 5. “Sarah is the oldest by one minute and she lets her brother know that,” said Jones with a laugh. Her younger kids, Isabel and Dylan, are 7 and in Grade 2 this year.
Between Jones, her sister and their three female cousins, her generation has given birth to five sets of twins. That’s given Jones plenty of opportunity to observe twins and get to know the parenting practices that nourish the individuals they are in a world keen to compare and contrast them. The parents I talked to for this column were adamant that raising each of their twins in distinct ways comes as naturally as it does with singletons. It’s the outside world’s preconceived notions about kids who share a womb that poses the biggest challenge to protecting their individual identities. Their message to other parents of twins is simple — there’s no one set of rules to follow about how best to parent multiples.
“It’s more about guarding your kids from the public,” says Jones. “When they were little, people would say, ‘Who is the good sleeper?’ or ‘Who is the talkative one?’ as if they both can’t be. I think it was just sort of reminding everyone, they can both be reserved, they can both be athletic. They can like the same things and they can like different things — and that’s okay.”
When she was expecting for the first time, Jones read a book on nursing twins. It preached the importance of feeding both babies at the same time. Owen would wake up ready to nurse, so Jones would rouse Sarah for the sake of getting them on a schedule.
“Owen, to this day, when he wakes up, he’s hungry, and he’s an early riser. Sarah will wake up and just lie there for 45 minutes, and doesn’t want to eat for another hour,” says Jones. So, with this wisdom and experience, she decided to approach her second set of twins differently, feeding much tinier Isabel as frequently as she needed while trusting that Dylan had filled his bigger belly and could sleep for longer stretches.
Dina Naiman, president of the non-profit parent support group Toronto Parents of Multiple Births Association, has triplet 9-year-old boys.
“They are very similar outwardly; they look like carbon copies. But when you’re their parents, it’s inherently known that they’re different people. Just like any parent who has two or three children, they nurture their individual needs,” says Naiman.
What can be a different ball game with multiples is just how attuned the kids are to fairness, she says.
Things get tricky when one twin (or triplet) may excel in an area like academics while the other one struggles a bit. In protecting the one who didn’t make the honour roll, for instance, you may end up celebrating your other child’s accomplishment in a more muted way than you’d do otherwise, says Naiman, and “you feel like that’s not fair.”
“What you try to do is find something to celebrate for each child,” she says.
Karine Ewart, a mom of four from Cobourg, Ont., has found ways to do just that. Her twin 13-year-old boys, Wyatt and Theo, have had different academic needs. Wyatt remains in the French Immersion program both boys started in, while Theo is in the English stream.
Although later both boys would be tested for and identified as gifted — Wyatt in a way that makes school easy and Theo in way that comes along with some learning challenges — Wyatt’s easier road to good marks was hard on Theo.
“Theo started to get down on himself, started to feel like he wasn’t as smart as his brother,” says Ewart. So she and her husband try to take the focus off marks and on the importance of doing your best.
“We found for Theo especially, he’s incredibly artistic. That only translates in one part of his report card, but we recognize that and make him feel empowered by his art.”
Dad of four Colin Carmichael and his wife welcomed twins to the family after they already had two children. Now living in Goderich, Ont., he says they try really hard not to lump twins Emma and William, 9, together through their choice of language. “We very rarely refer to them as ‘the twins’ because they have names. We don’t call the other ones ‘the singles,’” says Carmichael.
Instead, he says they try to “raise them as if they weren’t twins — just siblings that happened to be born on the same day.” In their household that unfolds naturally, anyway, based on the kids’ preferences. When Emma and William started junior kindergarten, they requested different classrooms for the kids out of concern that shyer Emma might rely too much on her brother for companionship and not forge new connections.
But some parents, including Toronto mom of three Erica Ashmore, take the opposite approach with her 51⁄ 2- year-old twins, Isla and Gwendolyn.
“I hope they’ll always stick together throughout school. They’re in the same class right now and I hope it stays that way because they have each other’s back,” says Ashmore.
Instead, they go their own way in the activities they do outside of school. “Gwen loves sports, whereas Isla’s more the artsy one. I never force them to take art classes together or to do sports together because one’s not into it.”
Naiman of the parent support group says there’s no one “right” way to handle the classroom issue that’s best for all sets of multiples.
“There’s a lot of educators who have strong opinions about separating twins. … I don’t think you create individuality — it grows on its own.”