“Be flexible” this is something I think and say everyday. Whether it’s in the gym in reference to my muscles or anywhere else in reference to “thinking”; being flexible is an often overlooked, under examined skill.
There are obvious components in my life that prove that I was meant to have twins. One of those is being a pediatric speech therapist. Social skills (pragmatics) are a functional component of communication skills. They enable you to think about other’s perspectives, choose which language style to use, body language, etc. Teaching children to learn social skills is a fun and challenging part of my job. There is a curriculum I’ve used over the past few years to address social skills called Social Thinking by Michelle Garcia Winner it’s a great program and I’ve seen it work. It also prepared me for twins. Twins need to learn how to share immediately, they need to learn how to wait their turn immediately. They learn from the very beginning that there are other people in the world. I use vocabulary from the social thinking program at home, it’s embedded in my lexicon. The boys hear me say things like, “Think about your brother”, “How does that make your brother feel?”, “Way to be flexible!”, “Good flexible thinking!”, “Let’s get our bodies calm, so we can think”, etc.
My boys are identical twins but they are complete opposites. Except of course when they always want whatever the other one has, it’s constant social training in our household. Here’s an example of all our hard work, cooperative play at 27 months.
The “roaring” you hear in the background are our neighbors kids pretending to be dinosaurs. I couldn’t have been more proud and am so happy I caught it on video!
Awesome — it’s funny how your career unwittingly prepared you for twins. Wonderful that you can directly apply your speech concepts to parenting. I can’t imagine how time-consuming and rewarding it is to parent twins. My hat’s off to you!
Thanks for your support Jen!