A big family in one fell swoop

Ell"; "hectic"; "chaos". These are just some of the words used by parents to describe life with multiples. While most parents say that even having single children totally changes their lives, with twin, triplets and quadruplets life is undoubtedly never the same again.

You don't have to have a history of multiple births in your family to give birth to more than one baby. Nor do you have to have had fertility treatment. However, these are factors. Also, if a woman starts a family later in life, she increases the chances of having multiple births.

There were twins in Jeannette Brophy's family two generations previous to hers, but they had died young and had largely been forgotten. Like many prospective mothers, Brophy was focusing on the health of her babies throughout the pregnancy; her twins were three weeks premature but were otherwise healthy.

Janet Keane's triplets were also born with no problems and she admits that she was "chuffed" when she found out she was expecting three babies. It felt like a family in one fell swoop, she says - and she focused on getting through the pregnancy rather than looking to life after that.

Then they came. Keane says the first few years were very physically demanding as the three children had to be lifted, fed and changed at more or less the same time.

For Clare, who lives in Limerick, the first few years were a blur, as her twins were very sick. They were born 10 weeks early and had respiratory problems and feeding problems. The children were later diagnosed as having cerebral palsy and, though they are healthy, it was an added burden on their mother.

Such complications at birth and problems after can have quite an impact on parents and the Multiple Births Association (MBA), of which Brophy and Keane are members, suggests that parents visit the baby-care unit in their hospital before their babies are born. This way they will have some idea of what is happening to their children if they need to be kept in hospital after the birth.

The strain on other children can be great. Keane says her older daughter, who was four when the triplets arrived, had a hard time when the focus was solely on the three new arrivals.

Another woman says her older son would leave the house every morning and stay with his grandparents so that he could escape the two screaming babies.

Giving and getting attention can be a problem in such settings. . "You are frantically trying to give a bit of yourself to everybody," says Keane.

Brophy also found this a problem. "If you are trying to explain what the leg of a table is and one of them is watching you and you have eye contact but the other is off looking somewhere else, they won't know what the leg of the table is. Is it the top of the table or what is it?"

It is for this reason that children from multiple births can develop more slowly than single children.

"We all learn our language from our mother," says Ger Parkinson, a social worker at the Rotuna Hospital in Dublin. "If there are two they are learning from each other. They are enforcing bad pronunciation." This is how some twins and other multiples can develop a language of their own that only they can understand.

Brophy says that it is important to have one-on-one time with each child for development reasons, and that this can also mean separating them - another issue for multiples.

Brophy began to separate her twins, now nine years of age, by sending them to playschool separately on different days. But in the beginning it was hard. "One was staying at home and crying. The other was going to playschool and crying. And I was crying as well. We were all crying," she says.

Keane's children are four years old and are attending Montessori. When they go to school they will be in different classes. "I want them to be individuals," she says. "Already there are kids calling them `the triplets'." Keane is less worried about her children's academic development than their social opportunities - being able to do things on their own, having their own sports and pastimes and having their own friends development as separate entities.

THE MBA recommends several "individualising" tactics. s individualism is brought out. When considering names, for example, parents should perhaps try not to choose similar ones. Even having the same initial may confuse things and encourage people to lump them together.

Brophy also recommends choosing names which are roughly the same length. As writing her own name is often a child's first attempt at written language, it is important that Pat doesn't have an easier time than Josephine.

MBA also suggests parents have a talk with teachers about their wishes for their children at playschool or school. If children are in the same class, separate notes home and a reminder to teachers not to call them "the twins" or "the triplets" could be useful. .

There are other needs for multiples and their parents that are in the hands of policy-makers. Parkinson is doing research on the experiences of parents who have had multiple births, and she says home care is needed to get parents through the first few traumatic years.

Society has changed and now there are few people living very near their extended families. As a result, outside care is needed. While people with twins get one-and-a-half times the children's allowance per child and those with triplets and quadruplets get double, Brophy says more financial support towards nappies and baby food is also required.

The number of people having multiple births is on the increase. In the last 10 years the numbers have increased nine-fold. In 1997 alone there were 1,350 twins, 76 triplets and one set of quadruplets. This will have an impact on parents, other children, the educational system and the health service.

The Multiple Births Association can be contacted at PO Box 5053, Swords, Co Dublin (tel: (01) 845 1087).