The extra finances and time required to raise twins is one thing (they’re worth it, of course, but it doesn’t change the extra stress that parents face). Another major challenge is helping your twins find the line between their close relationship with their sibling and their own uniqueness.

Twins constantly have to navigate between an inner desire to be with their sibling and be just like them while at the same time being their own person. Nobody likes being treated like just a copy or a clone of somebody else after all.

‘Today’s Parent’ has some spot-on advice on the more practical aspects of raising twins. One of their tips is to “master simultaneous feedings” in order to simplify mealtime and take some of the stress off the parents. Multitasking is a must when you have twins, there’s no way around it.

The same goes for giving your twins a bath. It’s far easier to wash them both because of the logistics: you don’t want to be giving one a bath while constantly switching your attention to what the other one’s doing. Of course, it would be easier if both parents could take care of their kids full-time, however, we all know that this isn’t always possible.

In an earlier interview, Eddy Ng, the James and Elizabeth Freeman Professor of Management at Bucknell University, told me that the pandemic has unfairly affected working women. The lockdowns weren’t the great gender equalizer that many thought they would be.

“Women, even those in professional and managerial jobs, continue to take on a second shift (caring for family) after the first shift at the office. We continue to subscribe to gender roles, even in many egalitarian societies,” Professor Ng earlier told Bored Panda.

According to Professor Ng, there is a “persistent pay gap and an underrepresentation of women in senior management and higher-paying jobs.” The expert said that during the Covid-19 lockdowns, men’s higher-paying careers have been prioritized over women’s which are seen as “supplemental income” even in Western countries.

“Women reorganize their work around family demands, men often do not. Unequal division of labor is exacerbated when a family could no longer access paid help (COVID restrictions), and women will have to pick up the slack,” Professor Ng said. Even though plenty of parents share duties when it comes to taking care of kids and doing the chores around the house, women are still expected to pick up the lion’s share of the work. Even in the West.

It’s not just twins or even immediate family members that can look like us. Most of us have been in situations where we’re walking down the street or channel surfing and we spot someone who looks just like us. Not a bit like us. Not mostly like us. A carbon copy of us. It’s like we’ve entered The Twilight Zone only nobody bothered telling us that.

Geneticist Arthur Beaudet from the Baylor College of Medicine explains that “people who look identical almost certainly share more DNA than two random strangers who don’t look alike.” So if you spot someone who looks like they could be your twin, odds are, they might be an incredibly distant relation of yours. A twin but not a twin so to speak. Which begs the question, how different would your life have been if the family tree were changed and you were raised together?

We’d love to hear your thoughts about raising and taking care of twins, dear Readers? Are any of you parents who have twins? Perhaps some of you have (non)identical twins that you grew up with? Let us know what that’s like in the comment section.