Best Way to Encourage Your Twin’s Individuality

The way you bring your baby up will have a strong influence on his personality. And whatever genes and personality traits are passed down your family line and inherited by your baby he will still develop his own characteristics. But how should you encourage identical twins, or triplets, who share the same genetic make-up and the same family and experiences, to develop their own identities?

A question of genes

Every baby inherits half his genes from his mother (via the ovum) and half from his father (via the sperm). Each sperm and ovum contains a different combination of genes, which is why every child has his own unique looks and personality.

And while it is easy to see where certain individual physical characteristics come from – those dark-brown eyes are definitely his mother’s, but that auburn hair must be his dad’s! – what about your baby’s personality? How can you tell which parts are inherited and which parts have developed over the weeks and months’? You can only guess. Trying to spot any family similarities is great fun – maybe he has inherited his mother’s calmness or his father’s sense of humour – but because your baby is influenced by his surroundings and experiences from the moment he is born, it is impossible to know precisely which characteristics he has inherited, and which have developed over time.

Being a twin

Nurturing babies as individuals is especially important if you have twins, or even triplets. This is even more important if they are identical twins.

Identical twins develop from the same egg and are always the same sex. And because they appear so very much alike physically, it’s easy to expect them to be alike emotionally and think in the same way. Treating twins as one unit rather than as two separate individuals can actually delay their physical and emotional growth, as well as slow their language and intellectual development. Thinking of your twin babies as different children and treating them as such is vital. This will help them develop their own personalities and give them a firm emotional foundation from which to grow.

Seeing twins as individuals

There are lots of practical ways of encouraging your twins’ individuality, including:

•  choosing names that sound very different
•  not calling them “the twins” hut referring to them as “the girls” or “the children”. Ask family and friends to do the same, too.
•  making sure that you and everyone else can tell them apart from each other. You may like to paint a little fingernail on one hand each in a different colour, give them different hairstyles, or even different-coloured socks so that they don’t get called by each other’s name.
•  avoiding dressing them in the same clothes
•  letting them have their own selection of books, toys, and other personal items, even if it means duplicating some of them. You can identify whose is whose with their initials or name labels.

Encouraging a sense of self

There are also lots of ways of nurturing your twins’ unique sense of self.

•  Spend time alone with each twin. This can be hard, especially if you have another child or children, too. But regularly having some one-on-one time with each separate twin will make them feel loved and valued as individuals, not just as a unit.

•  took for the unique in each twin. Learn how to appreciate what is special about each individual child, even if it’s just that one baby chuckles more when he’s tickled while the other loves bouncing on your knee.
•  Try not to compare them. General statements that tend to compare twin siblings can sometimes become permanent labels. As they gel older and more aware, such labels may actually damage their individual self-esteem and even create an unhealthy competitiveness. Always find something positive to say about each individual baby.
•  Introduce them to other babies. Do this from an early age so that they feel happy in social groups. With their similarities and close physical proximity, twins often develop a special bond, which may occasionally lead them to prefer each other’s company over everyone else’s.