Great Myths of Child Development

Stephen Hupp, Jeremy D. Jewell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118521236, 9781118521229
• eBook ISBN: 9781118521243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Great Myths of Child Developmen t reveals the latest evidence-based science behind the myths and misconceptions about the developing child.

• Shatters the most commonly-held child development myths
• Reveals the science behind such topical issues as twin-telepathy, sex-prediction, and imaginary friends
• Covers hot-button issues like childhood vaccines, spankings, "time-outs, " and breastfeeding of older children
• Features numerous pop culture references and examples drawn from popular TV shows and movies, such as Duck Dynasty, Modern Family and Mad Men
• Points to a wealth of supplementary resources for interested parents—from evidence-based treatments and self-help books to relevant websites

1
Beginnings

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• #1 Identical twins have a telepathic connection that originates in the womb
• #2 Couples dealing with infertility are more likely to get pregnant if they adopt
• #3 Parents can predict the sex of a fetus by examining the shape of the mother’s body
• #4 All boys have one Y chromosome (and all girls don’t)
• #5 The attachment parenting approach strengthens the mother–infant bond

Speed busting for beginnings

• #6 Identical twins have identical genes
• #7 A woman who is already pregnant can’t get pregnant again
• #8 The Chinese lunar calendar accurately predicts the sex of a baby
• #9 Female fetuses have faster heart rates than male fetuses
• #10 Epidurals create a high risk of harm during delivery
• #11 More babies are born during a full moon
• #12 Pre-chewing a baby’s food has no known risks

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Myth #1 Identical twins have a telepathic connection that originates in the womb

Perhaps you’ve heard a story like that of Silvia and Marta Landa; these 4-year-old twins made news when Marta burned her hand on an iron, and Silvia, who was miles away, felt a sharp pain and developed an identical blister [1]. During subsequent investigation, even when separated in different rooms, when Marta’s knee was tapped, Silvia’s leg started swinging; when Marta smelled perfume, Silvia covered her nose; when light was shined in Marta’s eye, Silvia’s eyes blinked. They seemed to have a special telepathic connection.

In 2011, the television news program Nightline began a spinoff called Primetime Nightline: Beyond Belief. The first episode in the series, “Twin-Tuition: A Telepathic Connection?,” examined special relationships between identical twins. The show’s reporter, Juju Chang, claimed “There are certain unexplained phenomena that occur between twins that even modern science simply can’t explain” [2]. Chang went on to explain the potential cause of the telepathic connection, suggesting that “In the womb identical twins actually start out as one physical being, one embryo that splits in two during gestation, but perhaps their souls are still entangled, even when their bodies are separate.” Jensen and Parker [3] referred to this connection that begins in the womb as “quantum entanglement” and suggested that the longer it takes the fertilized egg to split in two, the greater the special connection.

The Primetime Nightline episode includes the story of newborn twins, in which one twin frequently awakened from a deep sleep in another room at the exact same moment his identical twin brother was undergoing a medical procedure [2]. In another example, a 5-year-old started developing a black eye after her identical twin sister sustained an injury to the same eye in a playground. Chang asks, “Did one sister telepathically transfer her injury to her twin, or was it just a coincidence?”

The book Twin Telepathy, 3rd Edition [4] reports many similar anecdotal stories:

• A 3-day-old twin “screams in terror for no obvious reason,” helping his mother realize that his brother is “suffocating silently on the couch” (p. 2).
• A 5-month-old twin “yells his head off” while his brother calmly receives a vaccination (p. 2).
• A 6-year-old twin breaks his collar bone “within half an hour” of his brother breaking the same bone in a different manner (p. 59).
• A 7-year-old twin tells her mother about a dream, and her sister (who had not heard about the dream) later describes having “exactly the same dream” (p. 42).
• An 8-year-old twin starts searching for her sister upon inexplicably feeling “panic stricken,” and she discovers her sister has broken a tooth (p. 46).

These examples all focus on children, and Playfair [4] uses an unpublished doctoral dissertation (Spinelli [5] as cited in Playfair) to suggest that telepathy peaks at 3 years old and by 8 years old the connection is lost. Similarly, others have suggested that it’s best to study telepathy in twins before they reach adulthood because they will gradually become increasingly different due to life circumstances [6, 7]. Well-known and self-professed psychic Sylvia Browne suggests that psychic children are a window into “the spirit world of the Other Side …” [8].

Other anecdotes from Playfair [4], however, involve adult twins choosing the same gifts for each other (as in the case of Gloria Vanderbilt and her twin), simultaneous deaths (on the same day and in the same manner), and corresponding murders (in which the second twin didn’t know why he suddenly felt compelled to murder someone). Moreover, Elvis Presley was reported in the book to miss the companionship of his stillborn twin brother.

A telepathic twin connection is commonly represented in pop culture as well, and Playfair [1] indicated that The Corsican Brothers, a novel by Alexandre Dumas [9], is the first literary reference to this special connection. In this novel two identical twins could feel each other’s pain. The first example presented in the novel occurs when one twin says “I have experienced terrible pains in the region of the heart, and palpitations, so it’s evident to me that my brother is suffering some great grief” (p. 32).

Although there have been many stage and screen adaptations, perhaps the most notable is Cheech and Chong’s The Corsican Brothers [10] in which, as stated in the official movie trailer, “when one brother was being hurt, the other felt the pain.” Interestingly, the characters played by Cheech and Chong are not identical twins as in the novel by Dumas, but are in fact fraternal twins with different fathers (see the “Truth is More Surprising than Fiction” section in the Postscript of our book for more on this topic). In this movie adaptation, each twin intentionally and humorously hurts himself in order to cause pain to the other twin.

In the movie Twins [11], Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito play genetically engineered “identical” twins that unevenly split from the same fertilized egg, and Schwarzenegger’s character reveals, “We’re twins: I can feel your pain.” A more recent movie, Seconds Apart [12], tells the story of a police detective (played by Orlando Jones) investigating deaths perpetrated by adolescent twins with a sinister telepathic connection. The telepathic twin connection is also depicted in recent literary fiction. For example, in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower [13] series a villain attempts to take from the brains of children an “enzyme or secretion not produced by singleton children … that created the supposed phenomenon of ‘twin telepathy’” (p. 580).

Sir Francis Galton, who helped popularize the nature-versus-nurture debate, has been described as the first scientist to give twin telepathy serious attention [1]. Galton [14] indicates that about one third of twins have a “similarity in the association of their ideas” (p. 231), adding that they say the same thing at the same time, finish each other’s sentences, and surprisingly buy each other the same gifts. Although Playfair [1] calls this similarity telepathy, it’s probably unfair to Galton to suggest that he meant anything beyond the likelihood that it’s the identical genes shared between the twins that influence similar behaviors.

In the book Twins and Super-Twins [15], Dr. Horatio Newman describes twin telepathy as a commonly held belief, and this myth continues to be believed today. According to a Gallop poll, 31% of Americans believe in telepathy and another 27% report being uncertain [16]. In our own research, 56% of college students and 76% of parents agreed that “Some identical twins can feel each other’s physical pain” [17]. In another study published in Behavior Genetics, 40% of identical twins themselves (and 12% of fraternal twins) reported believing they had a telepathic connection [18]. In short, the belief in twin telepathy is widely held.

Because this belief is so popular, researchers have attempted to examine the possibility of a special connection between twins. For example, Nash and Buzby [19] investigated differences between identical twins and fraternal twins (who ranged in age from 5 to 13 years) using a test of extrasensory perception (ESP) to see if clairvoyance had a genetic basis. Over several trials the participants were asked to guess which of five symbols was on a card. Although the scores of the identical twins were positively correlated (meaning they were making similar guesses to each other) and reported to be significant, the fraternal twins’ scores were non-significant, spurring the researchers to conclude that ESP does have a genetic basis. However, in a following commentary, Thiessen [20] highlighted the fact that the scores for the identical twins were actually lower than chance. That is, each participant was tested across 150 trials and with only 5 possible symbol options they would be expected to get 30 of the 150 trials correct by chance alone. Nevertheless, their performance was, in fact, worse than chance, averaging less than 30 correct, providing no support for the hypothesis that the twins possessed ESP. Still, Nash and Buzby, unable to accept the conclusion that twins do not possess ESP, attributed their poor performance to a competition in which the twins telepathically tried to lower the score of each other.

Over decades of investigation, other researchers have failed to find a telepathic connection between twins. For example, one study published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research [6] included nine pairs of adolescent-aged identical twins in which one twin viewed an exciting movie, while the other twin (in a different room) was monitored for signs of physiological arousal. This study failed to show any meaningful telepathic connection between the twins, although the researchers devoted substantial speculation to why “the experimental situation itself would be unfavorable to extrasensory communication” (p. 78). As can be seen across many studies, failure to find significant results is rarely accepted as meaning that twins are not telepathic after all. Rather, some investigators go to great lengths to find morsels of evidence supporting the telepathy hypothesis in their research with non-significant findings.

Researchers have continued to develop laboratory procedures for identifying a unique twin connection. Jensen and Parker [3] studied three pairs of identical twins, ranging in age from 9 to 21 years old. Like the previous study, the twins were separated in different rooms, and while one twin was exposed to exciting stimuli (e.g., a balloon popping behind their head) the other twin’s physiological arousal was monitored. Overall, the researchers failed to find a significant connection between the twins’ responses. A follow-up study yielded similar unimpressive results [21].

We would like to share one final piece of inf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Great Myths of Psychology
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Growth, Body, & Mind
• 3 Emotions & Behavior
• 4 Social Environment
• Postscript: Closing Thoughts
• Index
• End User License Agreement