Parents

Abstract

Parent-child relations represent a structuring context within which children and, in this case, child twins live out their lives. Parents of twins make decisions about their twin children and, in doing so, communicate messages of identity on their behalf. As such, parents are important ‘players’ in the social process of identity construction. This chapter examines how parenting philosophies and specific parenting practices construct childhood and twinship in particular ways. It explores the ‘mission statements’ that parents make to convey their strategies for ‘raising’ their twins alongside the more everyday decisions made in relation to dressing their twins, placing them in classes at school, allocating bedrooms within the family home and naming them. As the previous chapter showed, since these types of decisions feature heavily in twin parenting guides, this allows some insight into the ways in which parents draw upon or discount normative notions of ‘how to bring up twins’.