Twins Development and Play

Despite the many myths that surround twins, your twins are unlikely to reach their milestones at exactly the same time. Sure enough, when one twin begins to talk, crawl or walk the other is bound to copy and follow shortly after but it is doubtful that they will both walk on the very same day at the very same time!

One certainty is your twins will keep you on your toes at every stage of their growth and you will need to be both creative and flexible when facing the challenging role of parenting twins. Just as you leave one difficult phase you will enter another. The relentless feeding demands will slow down and before you have time to reflect, you’ll be trying to contain two crawling babies heading in very different directions!

Keeping twins free from accidents is a key issue with parenting them and you will need to find extra ways to manage especially when there is only one pair of hands. Safety gates will go up earlier than normally necessary in order to help keep your twins away from the dangers of the kitchen, bathroom or from the stairs.

Just as they are crawling you will want them to walk to make life a little easier for you and then when they do reach the walking milestone you’ll be chasing after two little people who run at every opportunity in different directions!

Of course, all babies/children are different, and your twins may not be so adventurous. If they are the less adventurous type you will still have your hands full with two children at the same developmental stage. If you have older children you may find that your twins appear to develop faster as they have the constant stimulation from the other children and the ability to mimic at every opportunity.

You may read that it is more common for twins than singletons to have speech and language difficulties due to the number of twins that are premature or low birth weights and their parents having less time to attend to them individually helping them to develop their verbal skills.

One concern with twins development is with delayed speech and I have included a link from a particular study Are Twins Delayed in Language Development.  From my own personal experience having had two sets of twins, I can only report that none of my children have experienced a delay in speech; in fact with our identical twin girls they were early to speak and their speech was really very good from earlier than would be expected.

Twins Developmental Milestones