Each year parents of twins grapple with the question of whether they should separate their junior primary-bound twins or keep the pair together. As hard as that decision is for some, just imagine if that question suddenly became, “Should we hold just one child back for another year?”
If one twin is struggling academically or socially in nursery school while his co-twin is right on target, the decision of what to do can be agonising. It’s a predicament that Melissa Schroeder knows firsthand. Five-year-old son Michael lags socially behind his twin sister Madison and still struggles with speech. “Madison’s very interested in learning but Michael gets more frustrated,” Schroeder says. “He’s very intelligent but his skills are scattered.” Yet Schroeder and her husband never considered holding Michael back in preschool while promoting Madison to junior primary. “It’s one thing to separate your children by classroom but it’s quite another to separate twins by grade. It would be an irreversible trauma.”
But is it fair or prudent to push a struggling junior primary twin ahead just for the sake of preserving the twin bond? “Psychologically, if you separate twins into two different grades, there’s no way that one’s not going to feel smarter than the other one,” says Melissa Mullin, Ph.D. and an educational psychologist and director of the K & M Center, an institute that diagnoses and remediates learning disabilities. “There’s no way around that.” Although Dr. Mullin believes that parents should do everything they can to keep their twins in the same grade, even if that means holding both back in nursery school or junior primary, she cautions that parents first need to understand the type and the degree of the problem that the struggling twin faces.
Diagnosing the Learning Problem
The first order of business for parents is to get their child tested and assessed to find out if the trouble is a developmental delay or a learning disability. The difference between the two, Dr. Mullin explains, is significant when deciding what to do. “The problem is determining if this is a long-term difficulty or a catch-up process,” she says.
On the one hand, a developmental delay is a life long difference in learning capacity and learning ease. This is a child who would benefit from a special class or a special school specifically for children with learning issues. Furthermore, if a twin has a developmental delay, it is clear that his learning needs will be different from that of his co-twin. If a child is temporarily lagging behind, however, that is not called a developmental delay. For instance, if a twin is delayed in language but his speech is developing in the right sequence just at a slower than normal pace, more than likely it’s not a developmental delay. With proper and timely therapy, most twins with delayed speech will catch up.
On the other hand, if a twin has a learning disability and his IQ is in the average or above-average range, you’re talking about only a slight difference in ability. This is when parents need to consider the emotional impact of holding one child back. “The studies on children with learning disabilities show that holding a child back is not the answer, intervention is,” Dr. Mullin says. “Once the learning issue is addressed and with the correct intervention, the child should be able to function in the classroom without being held back.”
A correct diagnoses and subsequent remediation made all the difference for Sonia Fox’s twin son John. When teachers told the mom that she should consider holding her then first grader back a year because he struggled with reading, Fox looked into her son’s learning issue on her own. “John couldn’t control his eye movements. I watched him as we would try to read and noticed he couldn’t keep his eyes on the page,” she says. “He’d get lost and then frustrated and didn’t want to continue reading.” John was finally diagnosed in second grade with a tracking and convergence deficiency and started intense visual therapy. Today in third grade, he’s reading just a few months behind grade level. “It’s been a hard slog to get to this point,” says Fox, “My son is a very sensitive and I feel the damage to his self-esteem of repeating would have been great.”
Staying Together While Being Apart
Since most junior primary school classes are more developmentally challenging these days, another alternative is to look at two different schools rather than two different grades. “Some schools are easier, and some are harder,” Dr. Mullin explains. For a twin with delays, for example, choose a school that’s more developmentally progressive, one that will be a bit gentler in its approach to teaching and one that will let your twin develop at his own rate. For the twin who is on par for her grade level, the local elementary school may be a good fit. “Since you have two different types of learners, match each child with the right school.”
That’s the approach that Lori Lynch took with her six-year-old fraternal twin boys, Joey and Johnny. When April of their grade R year rolled around, it was recommended that Joey repeat while co-twin Johnny was ready to advance to first grade. Although it didn’t come as a shock, the Lynches were nonetheless disappointed. “Separating them meant one would be able to join Cub Scouts a year earlier, one could make made their religious sacraments a year earlier, and one would be college hunting a year earlier,” Lynch says.
They told the school district that splitting the boys was not an option. Instead, both boys would repeat nursery but in different schools and in different classroom settings—Joey in a more nurturing pre-K program and Johnny in a more challenging one. “After much debate and many meetings, both will be starting first grade together next year,” she adds.
For Dee Whisnant’s boy-girl twins, five-and-a-half-year-old Scarlet and Perry, the separate-but-together track began back in preschool. Both had delays in speech, but Perry’s was more challenging. After attending different preschool classes, the Whisnant twins are now in different nursery school environments as well -Scarlet is in a traditional class but Perry attends a school that promotes academics through communication and social skills. “Until and if he is able to be mainstreamed, he will be different from his sister,” she says. “He’s come a long way since starting this year but has a long way to go, too.”
The Gift of Time
If parents recognise now that one or both of their twins is struggling in nursery school, simply give them the gift of time by holding both twins back for one more year. This is especially helpful for twins with late in the year birthdays, and even more important for preemie twins whose true age should be based on their due date, not their birthday. “Most twins who are developmentally behind will always be behind - they’ll be late talkers, late walkers. So those children would probably benefit from being held back because you are giving them more developmental time to catch up,” Dr. Mullin explains. If your twins are not five by September, hold them back in preschool.
But what if twins differ? What if one’s on target while her co-twin is not? Is that fair to the developmentally ready twin? “How is it unfair to give your child the advantage of being the strongest academically, the most developed in the classroom?” she asks. “Sure, she may be done with her work quicker, but she can pull out a book and read while she’s waiting. Compare that to being the youngest in the class, always stressed out, always a step behind, and the last to develop especially when it comes to motor skills.”
By the time middle schools rolls around, age doesn’t matter. What’s more important is if a child is self-confident and can get along well with others. “I’ve never heard any parents say they were sorry that they held their children back in nursery school or junior primary,” says Dr. Mullin, “but I’ve often heard parents with children going into middle school wishing they had held them back earlier so that their kids could have had that extra developmental time.”
Higher Incidence of disability in multiples
It is important to recognise not all disabilities in multiples have the same cause. This is only a very brief summary and much more information can be found in medical texts such as Blickstein and Keith (2005). We are concerned here only with potential implications for schooling.
The Process of Twinning
The process of twinning, especially MZ twinning is linked with some congenital abnormalities such as cleft palate and certain cardiac conditions. Some of these may be associated with the split of the mass of developing cells into two or more individuals and some to placentation and the transfusion syndrome.
The higher risks of being born preterm and of low or very low birthweight
The best known example of such problems is Cerebral Palsy which is more common in twins, unfortunately even more common in higher multiples and especially common when one or more of the multiples has died.
Just imagine what it is like for the child and the family going through school as the disabled survivor of a set of multiples? And will the school even know this?
What has been recognised and emphasised in the last few years is that the babies are having problems before the birth and so the blaming of these difficulties on what happened at delivery is not appropriate in the vast majority of cases.
Another major problem is retinopathy of prematurity, the visual problems that some very preterm babies experience as a consequence of the oxygen-enriched environment needed to help them survive. It is not that this is specifically more common in multiples but rather that more multiples are preterm and therefore more likely to need such intensive intervention.
A common link between multiple birth and a disorder
For example, both Down Syndrome and DZ twinning become more common as mothers get older, though this is partly counterbalanced by the high miscarriage rate of babies with Down Syndrome. Another condition, Fragile-X is the most common inherited form of Intellectual Disability and there is some evidence that women with this condition are more likely to release multiple eggs and so have more DZ twins.
Growing-up as a multiple
There is a link between twins who are small for gestational age and language problems. Given twins on average are born four or so weeks earlier than singletons (and going as far as 41 weeks may actually carry risks for multiples), then being born at say 35 weeks does not carry the same risk of physical and behavioural problems for multiples as for 35 week singletons.
Many problems have nothing to do with multiple birth
The sad fact is that quite a few singleborn children in our population have behavioural or physical problems. No one can guarantee a baby or babies will be healthy. Every parent wants to know why a difficulty has happened in their child and sometimes the fact the child is a multiple offers the most obvious but not always the correct explanation.
Not only may “multiples as the explanation” be incorrect, it may lead to negative attitudes “If we had not had twins, this would not have happened” and even the idea that the only possible intervention is one specific to multiples. So parents may spend a lot of time trying to find other multiple birth families with the same disability, rather than drawing upon the resources and knowledge of families who have one or more affected singleborn children.
This still leaves many healthy multiples!
But the fact is that problems are more common in multiples, and those working in Special Education need to know the issues we have raised. We have deliberately not talked about how much more common problems are. If families expecting multiples are concerned about this, the best person to provide local information is their own specialist.
Obviously we cannot cover all types of disability and so we focus on the three main areas of reading problems, ADHD and that group of major difficulties that includes Cerebral Palsy, sensory problems and intellectual disability. Many people may think you should not classify something as significant as Cerebral Palsy in the same sentence as ADHD. But one of our Australian studies found mothers who had children with ADHD were much more depressed than mothers who had children with Cerebral Palsy and felt much less certain of their parenting skills. With Cerebral Palsy, people recognise your child or children have a problem and are supportive. ADHD is regarded by many with scepticism and often attributed incorrectly to bad parenting.
