how to deal with twins behaviour!!

[fatheroftwins]

Hi i am a single father with twins of 17 months one boy and one girl and am looking for any advice in teaching them things ie behaviour.They seem to fight over every thing and i feel like im for ever saying no..They also ham not a great attention span as when teaching them how to do things or say things they switch off..Any advice would be great thanx..

They're way too young to understand the difference between right and wrong/good and bad. What they will understand is that if they do something that gets a reaction, then they might as well try and get a reaction again.

So distract, ignore, distract again. The advantage of babies that age is that they are at least easily distractable - just move them quickly on to the next thing. Pick your battles or you'll go insane - some things just aren't worth the fight.

There's a multiple births topic on MN which might be useful - lots of parents of twins and triplets who will be well used to this! Might be worth reading through some of the threads. Click on Topics and there's an A-Z option.

second Hassled... distract distract distract

firm 'no' for something like going in to touch a hot oven but generally pick up and remove etc. As for the twin thing I have to say I let mine mostly get on with it - they have to learn to be 'equals' and they have to learn to stand up for themselves and get along. Fortunately mine naturally seem to adore each other but I do only intervene if whatever one twin has done has actually caused the other to be really hard done by. Generally if it's snatching or whatever I let them tussle it out and they seem ok with this. I would intervene if one was hitting etc, but we haven't had this. Not sure if this is the 'right' approach but it works for us.

Hi fatheroftwins.
We have 18 month old boys. We have had a lot of success with talking about taking turns, distracting as Hassled said and also being really positive about all good sharing and kind behaviour. For e.g, if one twin hands his brother something "Well done, A, what lovely sharing when you gave H that car he wanted". SOunds a bit trite, I know, but it really does seem to work. Also talking a lot about being kind, sharing nicely and taking turns has led to the boys saying "thank you" to each other as they hand something over and "A's turn" to show they want something.

If they really won't share something (i.e. take turns) then I take it away, but this has only happened very rarely.

Hope that is of some use. touch wood it seems to be working so far and we don't have too much trouble like that. BUT we do have 2 of many of their favourite things - 2 pushchairs, 2 dolls, 2 diggers, 2 push along cars etc etc. Maybe it is harder with g/b twins as they have slightly different toys?

The other thing that really seems to work is to use positive language whenever we can that emphasises the positive behaviour rather than labels the bad.
E.g
be gentle please instead of no hitting
keep your food on the table instead of don't throw food
keep your toys on the floor instead of don't bang on the window with your cars
Let the dog sleep instead of don't harass the dog
etc etc.

Best of luck, anyway.