Raising Twins: Parenting Multiples From Pregnancy Through the School Years
283
Raising Twins: Parenting Multiples From Pregnancy Through the School Years
283Paperback(Third Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610023337 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | American Academy of Pediatrics |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2019 |
| Edition description: | Third Edition |
| Pages: | 283 |
| Sales rank: | 378,444 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A New Adventure
Mom, can Andrew and I practice driving the car this weekend?" Ryan asked.
My identical twin sons, Andrew and Ryan, are growing up faster than I could have imagined. It seems only a few weeks ago that I saw 2 heartbeats on the ultrasound screen, learning I was pregnant with twins 16 years ago, and only yesterday that we removed the training wheels from their bicycles and watched them whiz by us, confident and elated with their new freedom.
Now, yet again, I'm feeling that roller-coaster sensation of watching our sons take yet another leap forward toward greater independence. Were they ready? Were we ready?
"Yes, Ryan, that's a great idea," I said, feeling a mix of emotions common to all parents — trepidation combined with love and pride. Our family has reached yet another milestone as our twins make their way forward on their unique paths into adulthood.
Your New Life With Multiples
If you are expecting or are already parenting twins, triplets, or more, congratulations! If you are nervous about the challenges of raising multiples, remain calm and take a deep breath. With preparation, planning, organization, and the support of those around you, you can do this. Feeling unsure about parenting multiples is natural because it is a completely new experience and responsibility. That said, you will surprise yourself with your ability to adapt to your new family dynamic. The first year or so with twins is spent synchronizing your babies' schedules to make life easier. As your multiples grow, you will nurture each of them as an individual. In the blink of an eye, your children will ride their bikes in figure-eight patterns around you. In 2 blinks, you'll help them register for drivers' education classes!
Your reaction to the news that you have more than one baby on the way has most likely been a mix of strong emotions. I admit, the first month after discovering I was pregnant with twins, I probably looked like a deer caught in the headlights. A hundred questions ran through my mind. How could I be having twins? Is this really happening? How on earth can we handle 2 newborns at once?
You and your partner may be having very different reactions. While I was nervous, my husband was thrilled and breezily optimistic. He told me, "Relax, it will be great! Everything will work out just fine." I appreciated his joy and confidence, but I felt frustrated that he wasn't showing fear of the unknown, while I felt unsure of my ability to handle the situation. I wondered just how steep our learning curve would be to find our groove.
Here we are, years later, and we have not only survived but enjoyed the chaos and excitement of our twins' early years. I was so nervous when pregnant that I had imagined it would be more difficult than it actually was to raise newborn twins. In reality, the day-to-day routine of taking care of 2 little babies at the same time is very doable. Take things one step at a time, one day at a time. Once your family starts using some strategies to streamline your babies' care, you'll breathe more easily and enjoy the whole process.
The challenges of raising multiples are what make the parenting successes, and the overall experience, even sweeter. It is fascinating to watch as each child's unique personality evolves and develops over time. The highs and lows of the parenting experience are amplified for parents of multiples. You'll have moments of intense exhaustion but also moments of unsurpassed joy.
Have faith in yourself and your parenting abilities. The human spirit has an amazing ability to rise to a challenge. Any challenge in life must be tackled one step at a time, and parenting multiples is no exception. One particularly tough day may feel as if it lasts an eternity, but soon a time will come when you look back and wonder how the early weeks and months flew by so quickly.
How to Handle More Than One Baby
You can care for twins or more by keeping in mind the basics of good parenting. A good parent provides love, safety, and security. When you look at the essentials, new babies need only a few things — something to eat (breast milk or formula), something to pee and poop into (diaper), a safe place to sleep (crib), and a safe way to ride in the car (car safety seat). If you streamline your ideas about what a newborn needs, remembering what is critical and what is optional, you can provide what is important to your newborns. Being able to tell the difference between basic requirements and the extras helps you stay organized and keep your sanity.
When you have baby twins, triplets, or more, an important mantra to remember is to keep your babies on the same schedule. Synchronizing schedules is a great way to happily survive the first year. When one baby wakes up to eat, wake up both babies for the feeding. If your babies' feedings are uncoordinated, you could easily spend the entire 24 hours of any given day feeding them, one after the other. If you feed 2 babies on 2 different schedules, you may not be able to sleep much, spend any time with an older child in your family, or recognize that vaguely familiar-looking person over there who reminds you of your partner.
How Your Parenting Journey Changes
The Early Years
Parenting multiples requires different skills at different stages. The earliest weeks and months with twins require stamina and an ability to streamline your daily tasks to survive with some semblance of sanity intact. As time wears on, you can ease out of survival mode and adjust to a different mind-set. You will be a master of understanding human emotions and interactions as you navigate all the different personalities that live under your roof. You will have as good of a grasp of interpersonal relations as an international diplomat.
Pregnancy
During your pregnancy, channel your energy into preparing your nest for your babies. Twins and other multiples tend to deliver earlier than single-born babies, so prepare for this in case it happens (see the Preterm Birth and Other Birthing Challenges chapter on pages 211–224 for more information). Another reason you should prepare early is that your belly will get quite large and uncomfortable as you approach your due date. Start attending your local Parents of Multiples club meetings to meet other parents of multiples and start collecting helpful tips, and join online support groups. Pregnancy is also the time to enlist family and friends for help in the upcoming early weeks and months after your babies' birth.
Early Infancy
During early infancy, your family will adjust quickly to a brand-new routine. The daily schedule will be filled with feedings, burpings, diaper changes, and catnaps, cycling through the days and nights. You and your infants will begin a relationship with each other that will strengthen with your love and consistent responses to their basic needs. You may discover during this period that while your infants were born at the same time, they have very different temperaments and personalities. Continue to show love and positive attention to older siblings in your family as well, and help them feel as much a part of the process as possible.
Later Infancy
During later infancy, you'll coax everyone into a more predictable schedule, and your entire family will know what to expect at certain times. Your older babies are becoming little people, and you are beginning to see what makes each of them tick.
The Toddler Years
When multiples are toddlers, life is overall much easier to handle, but you've got some major milestones ahead, such as toilet training and transitioning to big-kid beds. Strategies that work for single-born children need to be tweaked a bit when you're toilet training kids of the same age. All toddlers start to realize at some point that they are independent people, separate from their parents and their siblings. As a parent, help your toddlers make more decisions for themselves within an acceptable framework of behavior.
The Preschool Years
The preschool years with multiples are such a great payoff for the years of effort. Your home evolves into their imagination factory. They sleep all night (for the most part!), they use the toilet to pee and poop (for the most part!), and you're now able to enjoy them even more and nurture each of them as unique people. One of the many benefits of having twins is that their "twinship" teaches them about patience and sharing; the multiples experience provides built-in life lessons. Many experts believe that multiples may be more socially savvy than their single-born peers because of the relationships they've grown with since infancy.
The School Years and Beyond
In kindergarten and the school years, your multiples' world is rapidly expanding. As the years progress, keep in mind that parenting means raising future independent adults. You will make decisions about classroom placement, participation in activities, social dynamics, and more. Your children may already be quite independent, or you may be dealing with a fair amount of competition or interdependence between siblings.
Enjoying Your Parenting Experience
Parenting multiples can be quite hectic, and in the early days and weeks, it can consume your days and nights. You don't want to merely survive raising them; you want to have fun, keep your sanity, and maintain good relationships with your partner and your other children. Mundane tasks must be done to keep the home running, in addition to our desire to create fun bonding experiences. Instead of folding laundry all day, it would be nice to cuddle with our kids and read them another good book. Most of us cannot afford to hire sitters or outside help regularly, and not all of us have family nearby who are able to help make our personal or couple time a routine experience.
As a parent of multiples, you'll need strategizing skills and creative planning to streamline and organize the everyday, necessary tasks as much as possible. That way, you have more time and energy to simply be with your kids. Another part of the equation of happy parenting is finding time for yourself, for your friends, to exercise, and to dedicate to your relationship with your partner.
Maintaining a routine household schedule will go a long way toward protecting special time for your multiples, your other children, yourself, and your partner. Your best ally during your twins' early years is their need for sleep. Young children need plenty of sleep. If your family works together to maintain a routine bedtime for your kids once they have grown past the newborn period, you will have a couple of hours free every night to spend with other family members or to think a complete sentence in your head without interruption! A happy parent is a better parent. It is not selfish to seek out personal or couple time. It is healthy and will have positive effects on everyone in your family. One cannot pour from an empty cup.
One Size Does Not Fit All Families
My firsthand experiences taught me a lot as both a parent and a pediatrician. Our oldest son was only 18 months of age when our identical twin boys were born. My husband and I had to quickly figure out how to care for 3 kids, all younger than 2 years. I remember making a phone call to our crib manufacturer when we had a problem with one of our cribs. The woman helping me on the phone simply could not believe we had 3 kids in 3 cribs at the same time. Efficiency became our middle name as we coaxed ourselves and our 3 young sons to operate on a daily schedule so that we could all survive. We were both practicing physicians and had no outside child care assistance. My husband cared for our sons solo on the days that I worked in my pediatric practice, and I cared for them on his working days. Our fourth child, a daughter born a month before our oldest son turned 4 years of age, rounded out our family.
I continued to practice clinical pediatrics part-time through my twins' toddler years, and then I made the decision to stay home temporarily while my 4 children were young. Once all 4 kids were on a more regular school schedule, I returned to clinical practice and a university teaching faculty appointment. I can appreciate twin parenting from all angles — working outside the home, pumping breast milk, and working from home as your children's primary caregiver. My professional knowledge and real-life experience with 4 young kids has helped me learn strategies to efficiently, healthfully, and lovingly parent my children.
I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my insights with you and your family. Although this chapter and a few others in this book cover births of multiples in general, the following chapters, from preparing for your babies' arrival to the school years, focus on raising twins. However, all principals, strategies, tips, and advice mentioned throughout these chapters universally apply to families raising triplets, quadruplets, or more. For a specific chapter on triplets, quadruplets, and more, please see pages 225 to 232.
At times, friends, family, and health care professionals will be giving you advice and encouragement as you embark on your journey raising multiples. Listen to what everyone has to say and give ideas a try, but ultimately, only you can figure out what will work for your family and your situation. Not all families with multiples are the same. A family with 2 older kids and twins needs to operate much differently than a family of solely twin children or a family with triplets and one younger sibling. Accept the support and camaraderie of others, but you as the parent will find what works for your individual family. Have confidence in your own parenting judgment and abilities, and you will not only survive their early years but enjoy them.
CHAPTER 2Preparing for Your Twins' Arrival
My husband and I always hoped to raise a big family. We were eager to get pregnant again soon after our first child was born. As a working mother, I figured I should be efficient and have kids as close in age as possible. (Pretty funny that it turned out to be minutes apart instead of years!) Happily, the result of our home pregnancy test soon turned positive, and at the 6-week mark I brought baby Matthew along to visit the obstetrician for what I thought would be a straightforward initial checkup.
I mentioned to my obstetrician that I had experienced some minimal bleeding yet was otherwise well. Apparently, the bleeding was enough to warrant an ultrasound.
I entered the small ultrasound room with Matthew in his stroller. The tiny room felt toasty warm from the large ultrasound machine and other running equipment. As we began, Matthew began to fuss, so I hoisted him onto the examination table with me and held him securely as I tried to position myself properly while lying flat on my back. Matthew was content when he saw how fun it was to swat at the examination table's crinkly paper. I continued to hold on to Matthew so that he wouldn't fall, no small feat during an uncomfortable vaginal ultrasound.
The ultrasound technician seemed to be taking quite a while. "Hmm ... well, that's what I thought. OK, take a look at this," she said as she turned the monitor so that I could see it.
When you're looking at a fuzzy, moving, black-and-white image, it is challenging to interpret what you're seeing. But what I saw on that screen was unmistakable — 2 tiny spots flickering repeatedly, each to its own rhythm. Two hearts! The world stopped as utter shock and disbelief filled every part of my mind. It felt as if I had stepped outside my body and was watching the scene play out, like watching a movie about someone, anyone, other than me. I plan everything — twins weren't part of my plan!
Through my dizzy blur of emotions, clutching onto a wriggling, oblivious Matthew, I kept focusing on those 2 blips on the screen. They were so beautiful, so innocent, sending their rhythmic beats across the sound waves like stars communicating in the Milky Way. I was mesmerized and terrified at the same time.
Your Emotional Roller Coaster
The world of twins is an incredible, chaotic, remarkable, and challenging place. Unexpected joys will be yours as you watch your twins grow and develop relationships with each other and everyone in your family. Becoming a parent changes your life forever, but becoming a parent to multiples is truly a gift.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Raising Twins"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Shelly Vaziri Flais, MD, FAAP.
Excerpted by permission of American Academy of Pediatrics.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Please Note xv
Acknowledgments xvii
Chapter 1 A New Adventure 1
Your New Life With Multiples 3
How to Handle More Than One Baby 4
How Your Parenting Journey Changes 5
Enjoying Your Parenting Experience 7
One Size Does Not Fit All Families 8
Chapter 2 Preparing for Your Twins' Arrival 11
Your Emotional Roller Coaster 14
Taking Care of Your Body and Pregnancy 17
Listening to Your Body's Signs 18
Pregnancy Preparations 19
Twin Baby Gear: What You Need 22
Preparing Older Siblings 28
Nearing Your Delivery 30
Chapter 3 The Early Days and Weeks 31
In the Hospital 33
Coming Home 35
Keeping Twins on the Same Schedule: Starting Now 36
Feeding Twins: Breast Milk or Formula 40
Breastfeeding Twins: How to Do It 42
Formula Feeding Twins: Simplifying the Process 44
Burping and Reflux of Twins 46
Advice for Outings With Twins 48
Infant Colic Times 2 49
Pacifier Use 52
Seeking Support 53
Going to the Pediatrician 54
Getting Into a Routine 54
Chapter 4 Early Infancy and Getting on a Schedule 57
Sleep: What Your Infant Twins (and You) Need 59
Sharing Space: Cribs and Bedrooms 60
The Science Behind Good Sleep Habits 61
Strategies for Good Sleep Habits 62
The Power of the Bedtime Ritual 64
Daytime Naps 67
Feeding Your infant Twins 68
Your Twins Getting Stronger 70
Diaper Rash 72
"Twin proofing" 73
Returning to Work 74
Toys and Books 75
Outings With Your Twins 76
Continuing to Seek Support 76
Bonding With Each Twin 77
Chapter 5 Later Infancy and First Birthday 79
Sleep Patterns 81
Mealtime: A Whole New World 83
Solid and Table (Finger) Foods 85
Sippy Cup Training: Bye-bye, Bottles 87
Oral Health 90
Play and Development 91
Language and Communication 94
Safety Issues 95
Discipline: Working Toward Acceptable Behaviors 97
Your Emotions: How to Stay Sane 98
Finding Time With Each Twin 100
Year 1: An Extraordinary Time That Flies By! 101
Chapter 6 The Toddler Years (1- and 2-Year-Olds) 103
Sleep Issues 106
Transitioning to Big-Kid Beds 108
Nutrition and Mealtimes 112
Simplifying Mealtimes 116
Twins: Distinctive Individuals With a Shared Bond 116
The Importance of Positive One-on-one Time 117
Kind and Effective Discipline 120
Encouraging Language Development 125
Toilet Training 127
Safety Issues 132
Family Relationships: A New Baby 135
Keeping a Twin-Friendly Budget: Saving Time and Money 135
Having Fun 137
Chapter 7 The Preschool Years (3- and 4-Year-Olds) 139
Sleep Issues 143
Socialization: Twins' Roles Within a Family 144
Preparing for Preschool 147
One-on-one Time 151
Two Distinct Individuals 151
Expanding Social Circles 154
Consistency and Discipline 155
Advanced Toilet Training and Independence 159
Emotional and Social Support for Parents 163
Budgeting and Practical Matters 165
Rainy Days: Painting for a Crowd 167
Enjoying the Here and Now 167
Chapter 8 The School Years: As Your Twins Grow 169
Built-in Life Lessons 172
Classroom Placement 172
Competition 174
Balance: Pursuing Individuality Yet Avoiding Activity Overload 176
Boosting Literacy 177
Age-Appropriate Chores for Kids 177
Teaching School-aged Twins Vital Safety Information 182
Multiple Kids, Multiple Shoelaces 183
Bedroom Spaces 184
Family Dynamics and Behavior 185
Travel and Having Fun 185
Adolescent Multiples 187
Straight From the Source: What Twins Have to Say 188
Chapter 9 Support, Emotional Health, and Time-savers 193
The Teamwork of Raising Multiples 196
Seeking Support 197
Mental Health: Keeping the Big Picture in Mind 201
Keeping Your Cool 202
The Built-in Benefits of Multiples 203
Healthy Family Dynamics 204
Time-saving Strategies 205
Strategies for Special Occasions 206
Modified Expectations 207
Finding Lessons in the Mishaps 208
Where's the Answer Key? 209
Chapter 10 Preterm Birth and Other Birthing Challenges 211
The NICU: Different Levels of Care at Different Hospitals 214
Nutrition 216
Conditions Commonly Treated in the NICU 217
Bonding in the NICU 220
Going Home 220
From the NICU to Beyond 221
Facing Infertility 222
Chapter 11 Triplets, Quadruplets, and More 225
Pregnancy Preparation 227
Synchronized Schedules 228
Surviving the Early Months 229
Organizing the Multiples Way 230
Toilet Training 230
Interpersonal Relationships, Individuality, and Emotions 231
The Adventure of a Lifetime 232
Chapter 12 Multiples: Facts, Lore, and More 233
The Distinction Between Identical Twins and Fraternal Twins 236
More and More Multiples: The Statistics 237
The Representation of Twins in the Media 239
Chapter 13 A Glimpse Into the Twin Experience 241
Captain Scott Kelly's Story 243
Magda and Margaret 246
Lorelai and Leighton 248
Kathy's Story 249
Patty and Kathy 250
Andrew and Ryan 251
Alex and Ian 252
Multiples and the Wide World of Sports 253
Chapter 14 Single Parenting, Partnership Challenges, and Divorce 257
Early Signs of Trouble 259
Balance in Household Tasks 260
When Trouble Spots Emerge 261
When Divorce Is the Decision 262
Resources for Families Regarding Divorce 264
Resources and Websites for Families With Multiples 267
Index 273
