The Twins Obsession | Hacker News Reader

The Twins Obsession

newyorker.com

36 pointslermontov42 comments

We have two sets of boy girl twins. One set is two and a half years old and one set is two months old. Lemme tell ya... it's incredibly difficult. We have a lot of help and it's still incredibly difficult. I'm excited for when they're older because I think it's going to be amazing, we just gotta survive. And I'm excited for our kids, because it seems awesome to be a twin! And have twin siblings!

As a father of a 2.5 year old boy and a pair of 0.5 year-old identical twin boys, I hear you. Having 3 kids under 3 is at least 5 times as difficult as having the one.

Two sets of twins must be even harder. Hopefully you're getting plenty of help from grandparents.

Every day, we just keep telling ourselves that this is going to all be worth it later, but it's exhausting for now.

I always tell people having two kids is ten times harder than having one. I literally can't imagine having two sets of twins that young!

Also, it's my little personal crusade to normalize talking about not enjoying being a parent. It's totally ok and totally normal to have these feelings. It's ok to not enjoy this. It's not ok to absolve yourself from the responsibility you sighed up for, but it's ok not to enjoy it. Especially when they're young.

> I always tell people having two kids is ten times harder than having one.

My own experience is that having two kids is harder when they're young and easier when they're older.

I have friends with just one kid and it's definitely easier to have enough capacity for the kid when the kid is a baby or toddler and needs a ton of attention. Having two toddlers is exhausting.

But when the kids get older and more responsible, they can take much of their attention, socialization, and play needs from their sibling. When I've gone on vacation with friends that have just one kid, they are essentially their kids' playmate the entire trip because otherwise the poor kid is totally alone.

When I travel with my two kids, I do stuff with them, of course, but they also spend a lot of time doing stuff just the two of them.

Especially in today's Western culture where kids don't have as much autonomy out of the home to play with other kids, I think siblings are a huge help for kids getting as much peer interaction as they need. Though, of course, I support anyone who chooses to only have one kid for whatever reason.

I applaud your efforts. My wife often feels quite bad about feeling exhausted and frustrated, because she doesn't really believe me that it's a completely normal reaction to caring for 3 kids under 3 years old.

Feeling exhausted and frustrated with 3 or 4 young kids does not make you a bad parent or mean you're not cut out for parenting. It's a normal human reaction. People just don't talk about it much.

I go as far to say that minus a few people with god-like patience if you're not tired and exhausted from parenting and regularly don't enjoy it, you're probably not a good parent. It's like my boomer dad telling me to have more kids and how wonderful it is. Sure, it's super fun when you never change a diaper, never cook, never clean, never watch the kids alone, never take them to an appointment, never help with potty training, etc...

We have three kids.

When two are gone for some reason (sleepover, staying with family, whatever) we're always like "holy shit, one kid is barely harder than no kids!"

Just having 1 of our 4 removed from the house (any 1.. doesn't matter just pick 1), is basically 0 work. Everyone gets along and generally keep each other entertained. Having all 4 together is all of a sudden Lord of the Flies, constantly managing the dynamics... its incredible.

I've got 3 kids. They're a bit older now, but I felt that each additional one was a lot less work than the first. The third copied the behaviours of the older ones and became independent that much faster.

Absolutely; parenting young kids is awful. Luckily, I didn't really expect it to be very fun, even though I felt obligated to do a good job at it. The upshot is that parenting made me more fully mature than I would ever have become otherwise. That's an underrated aspect, imo, but I don't now many experience that.

It is exhausting. Glad to hear I'm not alone, thank you

We've got just one set of boy/girl twins...they're 14 now. Twins are clearly 10x more difficult than a singleton in the early years, but later on they're much easier...there's always a playmate of the same age etc. It gets easier, hang in there.

+1 for using 0.5 years as an age denomination. You're probably a great dad just based on that.

What do you have against my 113 month old?

I've got a pair of 2.5y/o.

The friendship I see blooming between them is the absolute best. There are definitely things that are >2x harder with twins: Getting dressed. And things that are <2x harder: Bedtime / bath. Cleanup.

YMMV, but I'm so glad we have kiddos the same age and got it via one round of pregnancy.

Having twins is four times as hard as a singleton. it's twice the amount of work that needs to be done. But you also have twice the issues per head, because responding to one, means ignoring the other, prolonging either the problem in one, or causing a problem for the other. it's hard facts.

Such certainty you have in my experienced difficulty!

I find for things like coercion, having one twin convinced makes the second one much more likely to go along. Easily <2x the work for those kinds of things.

lolol I project my certainty very liberally and without constraint.

> having one twin convinced makes the second one much more likely to go along.

that has been the opposite of my experience

I sympathize. Best of luck my fellow twin parent.

Oh wow! 2-3 is roughly the time things start to calm down after potty training and you're right back in it. Best of luck and "survival" is probably the right mindset. I have 9-year-old twins and these days I don't see it being much different than having two kids about the same age. The first two years though... I couldn't imagine going through that again!

A dear friend of mine had 2.5yo twins when she found out she was expecting what she thought would be baby #3...but ended up being babies 3, 4, 5, and 6! Identical triplet girls and a fraternal boy led to six kids under the age of 4--and she was very insistent that there had been no fertility treatments involved!

By the time I knew her, the quads were in first grade, and everybody seemed happy, healthy, and well-adjusted, but I cannot even imagine making it through four newborns and a pair of 3yos without a village!

Parents with a single baby can simulate the twin experience like this:

1. get your baby to fall asleep

2. wake them up, then immediately try to get them to fall asleep again

Can I ask have you, or really anyone, noticed cryptophasia or idioglossia between them as they develop? It's an incredibly interesting phenomenon (to me at least) and there is very little written about it, even here[0]. From everything I've read it's debated how common it is and how much vocabulary is involved, I imagine because it's very difficult to study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptophasia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idioglossia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_and_Jennifer_Gibbons

[0]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Oof, hats off to you! We had our first two kids at 20 months apart and it was so much harder than when we had the next one at 26 months. It really is much harder the closer they are in age, I think 3-4 years difference is the sweet spot.

Hang in there! It gets easier when they start playing together and it is nice to have overlapping friends groups when they are that close in age. They do fight more though....

We have 4.5 year old spontaneous fraternal twins and a 2.5 year old singleton. It's been great but it's so incredibly challenging. I've been primary for the twins since my wife was pregnant with our son. It's been a real wild ride and if it weren't for pictures I'm not sure I'd be able to remember any of it, honestly. We don't have a ton of help, so I feel rode hard and put away wet most days. But I cut myself a lot of slack in my personal life, like not being as dialed in on my nutrition as I used to be, or missing workouts, etc. I'd have really beaten myself up about this stuff a decade ago. Today, it's not unimportant but it's really not that important, either.

But I cannot imagine multiple sets. We rolled the dice with our son and I'm honestly thankful we didn't get another set, I have no idea how we'd have survived that. Kudos to you all for pulling it off!

I have two sisters and they're identical twins so I've read a lot about twins and they've told me numerous factoids and research into twins that they've come across.

What's fascinating is how various cultures treated twins. For example, the West African tribe Yoruba loved twins and worshiped them as Gods [1] while Australian Aboriginals had one them killed because they thought it carried an evil spirit [2].

[1] https://cwp.missouri.edu/2014/twins-in-west-african-culture-...

[2] https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-trad...

What is with all the objectification? Twins are people too. Even just the title, "The Twins Obsession", screams "objects, not people!", but then the next 80% of the article discusses sets of twins as if they're some curious and exotic bird to look at.

Also, what is with this misconception: "When twins aren’t being regarded as carbon copies, they are slotted (or slot themselves) into opposing roles." Dude, any vector can be projected onto another one, with an orthogonal ("opposing") component left over. You might as well say, "When Juan and Ji-hoon aren't being regarded as carbon copies, they are slotted (or slot themselves) into opposing roles."

Identical twins are super interesting to researchers, because when studying the human body, it's really hard to get a control group.

Even fraternal twins are interesting to sociologists if they were raised in the same household, since for the most part they would have the same or very similar lived childhood experience.

One thing I found out after my wife and I discovered we were having identical twins is that manipulation of embryos increases the odds of having identical twins.

In our case, the embryos were frozen, thawed, a few cells removed for pre-implantation genetic testing, frozen, thawed, and implanted again. Two embryos were implanted, but only one took hold. Then the one that took hold decided to become two people.

When we did IVF we were warned of the same thing! In fact, when you see an older couple with young twins, it's a really good bet that they did IVF. :)

(We ended up getting singles twice, but we like to tell people they started as twins until we cryogenically froze one of them for two years)

Fraternal twins are much more common than identical twins, because most IVF clinics will implant two embryos at a time, due to the chances of implantation failure.

(Also, for non-IVF, fraternal twins are also much more common, for different reasons.)

Our clinic offered a buy one get one free deal instead -- if the first implantation is unsuccessful, the second one is free, just to avoid that risk.

> because most IVF clinics will implant two embryos at a time

This is very country dependent and is actually changing quite rapidly.

I believe these days in the USA standard of care is single embryo transfer. It’s well known that twins are a much higher risk pregnancy:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5846681/

FWIW when my wife and I went through the IVF process our provider (RMA, who are basically a large US-wide franchise) informed us that multiple embryo transfer was not an option offered by their clinic (not that we would have chosen it, but point is it wasn’t presented as a choice).

Maybe it's a stress response. "One of my cells just disappeared! Better duplicate myself just in case"

Along that note, let me recommend Three Identical Strangers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Identical_Strangers

Thank you for the recommendation!

Greg Egan's book Axiomatic has a short story "Blood Sisters" around the medical implications of twins, interesting read

One annoying things with twins is that most doctors are clueless about their development differences..

At some point in time our twin boys didn't talk much and didn't interact much with other people? Doctors: they may be autistic, you have to test them, some test later: they are autistic --> panic and a lot of reading later: doctor, this big phone study in England has shown that twins (especially boys) speak at a later age. Couldn't this be the explanation? No, let's prepare specialised training..

Of course as a parent, you cannot take the risk so you do the specialised training, you are destabilised, etc. And .. finally our kids are 100% "normal"!

False positive can happen, but IMHO doctors doesn't know much about the developmental differences of twins so this kind of thing happen more often to family with twins..

I'm a triplet - seems weird to grow up with siblings that are different ages.

I have noticed my whole life by how much people are excited by it. I'm one of three boys, and many folks treat the fact that we are triplets with an air of mystery. It can be pretty funny sometimes.

See "twinship transference"

https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-p...

which I think represents some of the feelings that people imagine around twins.

I thought this was going to be about the twins who refused to sell the twins.com domain to the Minnesota Twins baseball team[0], but it looks like they did finally sell a couple of years ago[1]. I'm sure they mad a lot of money from that, but I found the idea of an average pair of twins holding onto it for nostalgia amusing, so I can't help but be a little disappointed. At least Ray's Boathouse still is holding onto rays.com, so I can enjoy tidbits like this[2]:

> It's been at least a decade since the MLB has asked to purchase Rays.com. However, Zeller's said if the league were to come back around he'd tell them the name's not for sale.

> "I'd probably take them upstairs sit on the deck, talk about baseball a little bit. Have some beer, discuss how the Mariners are going to beat the [Rays] in the playoffs and how we're going to win the World Series this year. There wouldn't be any discussion about selling the name. It's not for sale," Zellers said.

[0]: https://grantland.com/features/the-website-mlb-couldnt-buy/

[1]: https://domainnamewire.com/2022/08/22/major-league-baseball-...

[2]: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/rays-boathouse-ball...

Made me check out Nissan.com and it looks like Uzi Nissan died of COVID-19 but the DNS is still pointing to his NS and failing to resolve.

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