Most twins, triplets and more grow and develop along roughly the same lines as their singleton peers – even those who start out much smaller will catch up in time. But there is nothing to say fraternal twins, triplets or more have to reach milestones at the same time.

The exception is for identical twins or triplets, where you can expect the babies to have a pretty similar pattern of growth and development. Children born with special needs will also have their own pattern, and the difficulties of handling this may be particularly stark where their twin or other multiples are not affected. 

Tamba runs a group where parents whose children have special needs can share experiences and offer each other support. Find out more.

Language

A few areas of development can be slightly different in multiples, and one of these is language. On average, pre-school twins are about six months behind singletons in their language development. This is only an average: many multiples have no delay, and among those that do it is generally minor and resolves by the time they are 6 to 8 years old.

Language delay in any child can be caused by premature birth, low birth weight, siblings close in age and being part of a large family – and all of these factors are more common in multiple birth families.

But there may be additional factors at work. Multiple birth children often use their sibling/s as role models for speaking and because they are the same age they copy each other’s baby language. So-called ‘twin language’ is just the use and reinforcement of this undeveloped language, which leads to multiples using different words between themselves.

Some delay may also be caused by one sibling tending to speak for the other, so the quieter one gets less practice at talking. It may be that getting less individual time from parents also has an impact: with twins, for example, conversations tend to be three-way because one twin may not want the other to have the parent’s attention, and because parents often talk to both at the same time.

Most of these issues are not serious and will clear up with time. Multiples can sometimes suffer much more severe language problems, and for these children the earlier they can have help, the better the outcome.