Sharing

Hi everybody,

I'm wondering if anybody has suggestions about this.

My girls are 24 months, and are very close. So close, in fact, that they've more or less spent their whole lives sitting on each other, and we're starting to have some conflict with toys. There's been some biting (which I thought we'd grown out of), some hitting, some grabbing. 

I'm sort of at a loss about what to do to help them work through these things as a parent. With violence, I was trying a no tolerance "time out" policy, but whenever I single out one girl (as in, you're on time out now), the other gets very upset, and sometimes it feels like my intervention causes more bad behavior. There are definitely incidents where they just get frustrated and panic and attack each other, but sometimes (often) it feels like they act out the banned behavior on one another to test boundaries with me (example: baby A gently bites baby B in slow motion while they both watch me grinning). I've been trying to just say a firm "we don't bite" and separate them by a few feet, but so far it seems to be doing nothing (especially since they're magnets and are hard-wired to repeat, repeat, repeat). Has anybody else had the whole time-out concept backfire with twins? Do you intervene in their conflicts? What are you doing for discipline? Are my expectations for them even age-appropriate?

Also, what are other people's rules/philosophy about the big sharing question? They used to be so harmonious with toys! They would each drop whatever they were playing with on the ground and switch places, they had a fairly elaborate trading system for the high-value toys as soon as they could crawl, or they could just play together. So we generally just have one of every toy. Now, there is a lot of grabbing (seems to go both ways--they're equally matched), which then spins out of control. Sharing still is not a problem with other children. My pediatrician actually told me to do nothing to intervene, "let them duke it out," which seems like a bad idea (oh the violence). I want them to put their relationship with each other (and all people) before their relationship with things, but I also understand that it's almost impossible to do something like stack blocks or color or work on a puzzle with another set of hands trying to do it at the same time (with the same exact block, crayon, and puzzle piece)--there's a lot of skills that they need to be learning right now by playing by themselves. I do put toys on time out. I try to maintain a "no grabbing" rule (they respond to it with the "look, mom, we're grabbing! over and over again!" game). I encourage trading. Other than that, definitely at a loss on this one, and things seem to be getting worse.

Twins really are a different game, aren't they? 

Thanks for your help,

Liz 

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