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 […]
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Sibling Rivalry: It’s Never out of Fashion
A recent post on Facebook by a mother asking for advice about handling her twins’ constant arguing generated more than one hundred comments. I read through most of the responses, looking for recurrent themes, thoughts, or threads. Curiously, a number of adult twins wrote that fighting among twins is normal and not to worry. Parents posted concerns about biting, hitting, verbal and physical aggression, and incessant bickering. The post prompted me to reread a book published more than fifteen years […]
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 […]
Happiness Is in the Remembering
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has coined a few terms to distinguish between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.” He believes that what we remember resonates more strongly than what we experience. Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun, borrows this perspective to explain the discrepancy between parental discontent about the day-to-day drudgery of taking care of children and the indescribable joy and rewards of raising children. She writes, “It may not be the happiness we live day to […]
Happy Wife: Happy Life
“Women cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. . . . When couples quarrel it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.” These sentences, originally written by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, and quoted in Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, caught my attention and piqued my curiosity. I am an adamant “ambivalence” advocate and have written repeatedly […]