Comments on: Artificial Twinning: A Good Idea?

By: banjon

banjon — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:11:01 +0000

Hi. I hope you’all can give me a little advice. My wife and I are in a strange situation. After years of trying to conceive and one earth-shattering miscarriage, we got very excited about adoption, and have thrown ourselves into the issues around intercultural transnational adoption (we are both white). We got our international clearance two weeks ago and then were shocked 3 days ago to discover that we were pregnant. The next day we got a referral for an infant from Guatemala. We never had any intention of “artificial twinning” and we don’t know what to do. We’re both in our early forties, the Guatemalan laws are changing, My wife’s pregnancy may or may not be successful. Our adoption agency is, we’ve just found out, closing up shop because of the Hague stuff. If we accept the referral, we will likely end up with two children who are 8 months apart in age, both arriving at more or less the same time. It would be our first experience with parenthood. We need to make a decision on the referral right away.

Any words of wisdom?

By: Enat

Enat — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 01:33:55 +0000

We adopted our son, who was officially 21 months old, when our bio daughter was 33 months old. It has since become clear that our son is somewhere between 3 months older and 3 months younger than our daughter. They are definitely artificial twins. I go back and forth on whether it was a good idea. Some days I feel like, "Wow, the kids love and enjoy each other so much, it's so great for them that have each other" and "Wow, Ramona never gets a second to herself and Efram is so desperate to be like her that he rarely expresses any independent sentiments," although as they are getting older (four), Efram seems to be finding his own identity more. We have to watch ourselves to make sure we don't slip into treating them as a unit.

I think that the fact that they are different genders makes it easier for them to be so close in age.

Would we do it again? No, because then we would have triplets!

Would I recommend it to other people? Probably not.

By: Nancy Spoolstra

Nancy Spoolstra — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 01:17:43 +0000

We were ignorant about the risks and ramifications when we did it 12 years ago, adding a 9 year old, physically, sexually and emotionally abused orphanage child to a family that had a 9 year old bio child. The two boys couldn’t have been more different, and our bio son was always a HUGE threat to our adopted son.

Twelve years later our adopted son still struggles mightily with issues. I’ll be blogging about him shortly…

By: Erin H

Erin H — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:59:12 +0000

M,
I just have a second here, but we have two sets of “artificial twins”. We adopted Maggie from VN when she was three months old, and then we adopted Amanda from Korea when the girls were both almost 2 years. They are 3 months apart. I worried about it alot before Amanda came because they were the same sex, but it has worked out amazingly well. The girls are almost five years old now and they are the best of friends. They have never been competitive with each other for attention or in any other way. I can’t imagine one without the other. They have gotten into some “double trouble” but I guess that is to be expected!
Our other set is our bio son Ryan and our AA daughter Des who we adopted when she was 6. Those two are two months apart in age. Since one is a boy and one is a girl and they are different races, no one mistakes them as twins. , but they have been in the same class now and for two years and they love it and they are very close friends. Des even says that Ry is her best friend.
So for us, it has worked out great. I do have kids that I would never “twin” because of their personalities/ages. I do think it is super important to take each individual child and situation into account before saying it is a good or bad thing for that family. I think that your experience is very typical and good for parents to read.
Good topic (and your boys are darling!!!)
Hugs,
E