Identical Twins explores the unique status of twinship and how it can affect personal and familial relationships with siblings, romantic partners, and friends. Drawing from the rich qualitative data from over one hundred interviews, Joleen Loucks Greenwood shares the benefits and challenges associated with the experience of being an identical twin and discusses ways in which all social relationships are positively and negatively impacted by this dynamic. This book is a must-read for family scholars, such as family sociologists who study family and sibling relationships as well as psychologists who focus on personal and social relationships, as well as anyone interested in the study of identical twins.

Journalist Abigail Pogrebin is many things—wife, mother, New Yorker—but the one that has defined her most profoundly is “identical twin.” As children, she and her sister, Robin, were inseparable. But when Robin began to pull away as an adult, Abigail was left to wonder not only why, but also about the very nature of twinship. What does it mean to have a mirror image? How can you be unique when somebody shares your DNA? In One and the Same, Abigail sets off on a quest to understand how genetics shape us, crisscrossing the country to explore the varied relationships between twins, which range from passionate to bitterly resentful. She speaks to the experts and tries to answer the question parents ask most—is it better to encourage their separateness or closeness? And she paints a riveting portrait of twin life, yielding fascinating truths about how we become who we are.

Do identical twins get the same teeth at the same time? Do they feel each other's pain? Should they be placed in the same classroom or separated? Should they dress alike? Should they get the same gifts on birthdays and holidays? Are identical twins hereditary? Are their fingerprints alike? When the hospital pediatrician told Lori Duffy Foster her twins were identical, her mind started reeling. She is a journalist and curiosity is in her nature. So she started a blog to record observations of her own twins as they grew, and to provide other parents of identical twins and their relatives with answers to questions they wouldn't find anywhere else. That blog became this book. Raising Identical Twins: The Unique Challenges and Joys of the Early Years takes readers on a journey from the birth of her twins through their sixth birthday, and is peppered with fascinating facts, advice and studies specific to children who share DNA. It is intended to entertain and inform while, hopefully, spreading some of the happiness and love her twins bring her own family throughout the universe.

The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart startled scientists by demonstrating that twins reared apart are as alike, across a number of personality traits and other measures, as those raised together, suggesting that genetic influence is pervasive. Segal offers an overview of the study’s scientific contributions and effect on public consciousness.

The combination of a riveting true story and cutting-edge twin research makes this book an irresistible page-turner. Identical twins Begoña and Delia were born thirty-eight years ago in Spain’s Canary Islands. Due to chaotic conditions at the hospital or simple human error, the unthinkable happened: Delia was unintentionally switched with another infant in the baby nursery. This fascinating story describes in vivid detail the consequences of this unintentional separation of identical twin sisters. The author considers not only the effects on these particular sisters, but the important implications of this and similar cases for questions concerning identity, familial bonds, nature-nurture, and the law.

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Takes the first in-depth look at the New York City adoption agency that separated twins and triplets in the 1960s, and the controversial and disturbing study that tracked the children’s development while never telling their adoptive parents that they were raising a “singleton twin.” In the early 1960s, the head of a prominent New York City Child Development Center and a psychiatrist from Columbia University launched a study designed to track the development of twins and triplets given up for adoption and raised by different families. The controversial and disturbing catch? None of the adoptive parents had been told that they were raising a twin—the study’s investigators insisted that the separation be kept secret. Here, Nancy Segal reveals the inside stories of the agency that separated the twins, and the collaborating psychiatrists who, along with their cadre of colleagues, observed the twins until they turned twelve. This study, far outside the mainstream of scientific twin research, was not widely known to scholars or the general public until it caught the attention of documentary filmmakers whose recent films, Three Identical Strangers and The Twinning Reaction,left viewers shocked, angered, saddened and wanting to know more. Interviews with colleagues, friends and family members of the agency’s psychiatric consultant and the study’s principal investigator, as well as a former agency administrator, research assistants, journalists, ethicists, attorneys, and—most importantly--the twins and their families who were unwitting participants in this controversial study, are riveting. Through records, letters and other documents, Segal further discloses the investigators’ attempts to engage other agencies in separating twins, their efforts to avoid media exposure, their worries over informed consent issues in the 1970s and the steps taken toward avoiding lawsuits while hoping to enjoy the fruits of publication. Segal's spellbinding stories of the twins’ separation, loss and reunion offers readers the behind-the-scenes details that, until now, have been lost to the archives of history.

Even twins are unique. Most people idealize twins, fantasizing a close, perpetually loving relationship. Yet Klein, herself an identical twin, demonstrates that twins have complicated and intense relationships that range from over-identification or excessive closeness to profound estrangement and conflict. Most twins who are raised as individuals deal with the significant emotional pain of separation in adolescence or young adulthood, yet as mature adults can come to love and respect each other as individuals. As Klein makes clear, the parenting that twins receive as infants and young children affects the relationships that they have with one another and with the world they choose to function in. Because parenting is a critical determinant of psychological well-being, it should be treated as a serious but manageable challenge. This book is a must-read for twins, their parents, and scholars, students, and other researchers and professionals dealing with mental health and child development.