Treating Twins, Triplets and More as Individuals
We love when we have siblings enrolled at Kiddie Academy® Educational Child Care and many Academies are blessed with brothers and sisters in attendance. In most cases, those siblings are spread among different classrooms based on their ages. However, in some instances, our Academies serve families who are parents of “multiples” – twins or more. In these situations where your children are the same age, and often look exactly alike, there are special considerations we like to keep in mind.
“We encourage the individual Academies and the parents of twins and other multiples to discuss the best approach for educating and socializing their children,” said Sandra Graham, Kiddie Academy’s Director of Training. “It’s generally up to the parents’ to ultimately decide if their children share a classroom.”
Graham said that regardless of whether the multiples are in the same classroom or not, there are best-practices we follow based on recommendations from child-development experts. Those guidelines include:
Treat each multiple as an individual. Don’t refer to them in a collective form (i.e, “The twins”). Each child has a different personality and learning style.
Make the effort so that you’re able to tell them apart. Look for the physical differences that indicate which child is which. If necessary, ask the parents how to tell one from another.
Don’t label the children. For instance, don’t say things like, “That’s the quiet one.”
Don’t assume that just because they look alike, the children will like doing the same things. Again, each child is an individual.
Here are some additional resources for parents of multiples:
“How to Prepare Twins for Preschool” – healthychildren.org
“Special Delivery: Twins at School” – Scholastic
“Books for Parents of Twins” – Washington State Twin Registry
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