Category Archives: Independence

Two Different Worlds

I have been thinking about two sessions I had recently with two different twin clients—both struggling with twin loss, physically and emotionally. One woman has been attempting to work through her grief about the death of her twin sister, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack a few months ago. My client and her sister were incredibly close. Although they were both married with careers and children, they spoke every day and saw one another frequently. They shared an inexplicable […]

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“Figure It Out, Parents”

I am quoting a line from a wonderful article written by Meredith Bland for Time.com entitled “When One Twin is More Academically Gifted.” Bland is a well-known and well-respected freelance writer and blogger at pileofbabies.com. She is a fraternal twin herself and the mother of first-grade boy/girl twins. The conundrum she discusses in her article mirrors the dilemma faced by countless parents of twins: how do parents handle school placements when their twins have very different skill sets? Bland shares […]

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The Scrooge of Twindom

My short presentation at the Budapest conference for the International Twin Society for Twin Studies and the World Congress of Twin Pregnancies conveyed my habitual passionate views about what twins require to become healthy individuals. I talked a bit about how parents struggle to differentiate and bond with two babies. Despite our best efforts, we default to labeling rather than describing each child. I am as guilty as the next person of labeling as it provides a shorthand communication that […]

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Stories and Statistics

Being an “outlier” has its advantages and disadvantages. When I delivered my short presentation at the Budapest conference for the International Twin Society for Twin Studies and the World Congress of Twin Pregnancies, I was the only speaker who did not have a statistic-based PowerPoint presentation. My sole PowerPoint slide highlighted the primary issues I feel passionate about: Triadic connection of a twin pregnancy Ultrasound examinations/labeling The twin mystique Deconstructing the twin connection Life is not fair, and twins are […]

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Reflections on the Budapest Conference

The conference I attended last month in Budapest was a joint meeting of the International Twin Society for Twin Studies and the World Congress of Twin Pregnancies. As one might expect, the primary emphasis was on the reporting of genetic studies that use monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins as the control groups to determine the heritability of various illnesses, personality traits, and well-being. The members of the World Congress of Twin Pregnancies focused primarily on the diagnosis and treatment […]

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