Following my radio interview on KQED in San Francisco, a listener wrote an email chastising me for propagating unnecessarily negative views about twin development. Moreover, my colleague Dr. Nancy Segal also expressed a similar viewpoint by stating that statistics show that twins are no more at risk for mental health issues than anyone else in the population. She, too, seemed uncomfortable about my desire to highlight adult twin challenges. While I am well aware that most twin relationships are healthy […]
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Three Twinship Myths: Setting the Record Straight
In 2015, Dawn Van Osdell from the online magazine UrbanFamily approached me for an interview as part of their Myth Busters series. UrbanFamily has graciously allowed me to share the resulting article about demystifying the twin mystique. 3 Misconceptions about Twins, Busted! Dawn Van Osdell There’s a lot of contradictory and downright erroneous parenting info floating around out there. We’re not afraid to tackle it head-on! Societally, we have a fascination for twins, likely because they used to be a pretty […]
Getting Back into the School-Year Swing of Things
Betsy Brown Braun is a child development and behavior specialist, parent educator, and author of Just Tell Me What to Say and You’re Not the Boss of Me. She has graciously allowed me to share this terrific back-to-school blog post from her website (August 3, 2018). Smooth the Start to the New School Year 2018 Betsy Brown Braun Just thinking about the start of school can be stressful for kids. New teachers, new classrooms, new friends, new expectations, new routines. On top […]
Three Traumatized Identical Strangers
The documentary Three Identical Strangers reveals the story behind the uncanny, mystical reunion of nineteen-year-old identical male triplets who had been separated at birth. The details of the boys’ adoptions are horrific—the boys and their adoptive parents were deliberately uninformed about the boys’ siblings, and the adoption agency collusively conducted a secret experiment on nature versus nurture variables using adoptees. Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent child psychoanalyst at the time and the head of this experiment, was a proponent of […]
College Caretaking Casualties
Though the majority of calls that I receive are requests for advice, I had the pleasure of speaking with a female college-age twin about her journey of separating from her sister. I was delighted to hear how she and her sister have been approaching this subject honestly and mutually. Both women realize that their familiarity with one another has limited their ability and motivation to socialize with others. They recognize that they need to do more on their own and […]