Raising twins and multiples

• Profile
• At a glance
• The challenges
• For further help

Profile

Janine and Michael are parents of identical twin daughters, Jasmine and Angie, who are one year old. They live in Darwin, Northern Territory.

Janine
‘The girls were born two months premature and spent the first seven weeks in hospital, with four weeks in a humidicrib. It was a stressful time, with all the travelling to hospital, but now they’re healthy and developing normally.

‘For me, the most difficult thing has been related to breastfeeding. Because of their age, they had problems with physically attaching to the breast, and I found it really hard to get good hands-on help with the breastfeeding issues associated with twins. There’s much more help for singletons, but maybe it’s to do with where we’re living. Help is available but it means going to see people in their offices, and that’s really hard with two little babies. But we persevered and I ended up breastfeeding for 8½ months.

‘The hardest thing for my husband has just been finding some down time. He’s been working full-time then coming home to full-on baby time, as well as interrupted sleep. It was constant.

‘Now we’ve made it a rule in our house that Sunday is our family day. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “Oh, we’ve got to mow the lawn” or “We need to fix this and that”. Then suddenly it’s Sunday night and you haven’t spent any quality time together. Now we make sure that no matter how much work there is to do around the house, we always spend Sunday afternoon just relaxing together.

‘In the future we expect that one of the big challenges we’ll face will be to do with people making comparisons. I’m constantly asked questions like, “Which one is the extrovert?” It’s not like that – you don’t want to label them. I feel very strongly about this. They can both be extroverted and they can both be reserved. It’s a matter of trying to politely encourage people not to compare them this way.

‘It’s quite expensive having two children at the same time. You can’t rely on hand-me-downs and the extra expense will be ongoing. But on the other hand, it’s so much fun to watch them develop. They have their own relationship and play all these little games together. They interact in a way that is completely independent of me. It’s really nice to watch that.’

At a glance

• Around 1.6% of all Australian pregnancies result in multiple births, and 98% of these are twins.
• The chance of having triplets is 1 in 945, quadruplets 1 in 17 700, and quintuplets 1 in 156 000.
• The median age of women having pregnancies resulting in multiple babies is 30.
• The increase in multiple births is linked to the age of the mother (older women frequently have a ‘fertility spurt’), improved neonatal care (more premature babies survive) and fertility treatments.
• Around 100 sets of higher order multiples (triplets or more) are born in Australia each year.

The challenges

Multiple birth babies can mean multiple times the work parents must perform! But on the bright side, parenting multiple birth babies can also multiply the amount of joy and level of fascination associated with raising children.

Being tired
There’s no doubt that looking after multiple babies is more work and often more complicated than parenting a single baby. Parents of multiples have more expense, get less sleep and are under more time pressure and greater stress than parents of a single baby. Breastfeeding can be a real problem for mothers of multiples, with many mums unable to breastfeed at all. After the first three months, mothers of multiple birth babies are more likely than mothers of one baby to report being exhausted, having no time to themselves and being depressed.

Illness, disability and mortality
Two or more babies means that the space in the mother’s uterus is restricted. This means there’s an increased likelihood of premature birth (on average, twins are born three weeks earlier than singletons) and a lower birth weight. Often, premature birth is deliberate, as fetal growth has slowed or stopped (twins tend to stop growing at around 32 weeks; triplets at 28 weeks; quads at 26).

Multiple birth babies are also more likely to have biological handicaps such as cerebral palsy. Additionally, the rate of perinatal mortality (the period just before to after the birth) increases dramatically for multiples: for single child births the mortality rate is less than 1 in 1000, but this increases to 19.6 in 1000 for twins, and 83.3 in 1000 for triplets. Identical babies are at greater risk than non-identical babies.

Growing up in a family
Often twins will ‘stick together’. This can deprive them of important interactions with others where they might learn all kinds of things, particularly language. Sometimes multiple birth children will develop their own ‘language’, which is really the result of the children re-enforcing immature speech. This form of communication might isolate them socially and can delay their speech development.

The greater time pressure on parents and the increased closeness between twins often means parents are less involved with their multiple birth babies than they would be if they’d had one baby. Each child has less opportunity for one-on-one time with a parent, and the sheer busyness of parenting can make it harder for parents of multiples to be as responsive and sensitive to their children’s needs. Multiple birth children can also experience less praise and receive fewer overt expressions of affection.

Each child has different needs and doesn’t necessarily need exactly the same things as their siblings. It’s important to help each child develop as an individual, as well as enabling each one to celebrate being a multiple.

Within families of multiple birth children, older siblings can often feel displaced when twins or triplets arrive, especially if their relationship with their parent was particularly close beforehand. Encourage older children to be involved in the preparations for a multiple birth while making time for their needs and interests. Ensure that friends and relatives remember than an older brother or sister is very special too.

For further help

Australian Multiple Birth Association: support, resources and education for parents of multiples
Twins and Multiples: a Curtin University website about helping your multiples learn

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