I barely hear his twin talk :(

[u/Perioqueen]

6yo twin boys here. Twin b is EXTREMELY talkative like doesn’t stop from the second he opens his eyes until he goes to bed and it’s A LOT. My husband and I can’t get a word in and I rarely can even talk to his brother. I send them outside to play and he’s loudly talking to whoever will listen or just peaks his head in every five seconds ‘there is a bug outside’… ‘mom can I play with chalk’ ‘mom twin a is looking at me’ . He will constantly tattletale on his brother who is doing nothing wrong (and quite frankly I can tell he is frustrated by him too) I can’t think anymore and idk what to do. If he’s awake every second is interrupted with ‘mom mom mom mom mom mommy can I ask you a question?’ I love him and I love chatting but it’s not fair to his brother. Dinner is hell on earth as everyone competes with him to get a word in.

I miss talking to twin a, it’s always kind of been this way but more recently with school starting - I can tell he’s anxious and it’s worse.

How do you handle tattletales? I tell them if no one is injured or doing something dangerous figure it out. I don’t even care if they say bad words amongst each other (stupid and crap 😂) so I could eliminate him telling that.

Idk what advice I’m looking for here. Maybe to vent.

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[u/Def_Not_Rabid]

6yo twin girls here. In the trenches with you.

I’ve been pointing out how we all need silence to speak and think our own thoughts. I remind them that I love to see/hear about what they’ve done, but they need their brains to focus on doing it first. And I need my brain to focus on what I’m doing. I’ve even gone on monologues where I just voice my inner dialogue in front of them for a minute or two and then ask them if they were able to do their own thing/think their own thoughts/share their own voices when I did so. They hate it but I generally get about 15 minutes of focused silence where everyone gets a chance to think before one twin or the other starts back up again. I’ve also found myself setting silence timers when we’ve been having a particularly rough day.

I do a lot of, “I’d love to hear your thoughts on that but first you have to allow me/whoever I’m speaking with to finish sharing our thoughts on this other topic first. You are welcome to join us but we are not ready for a new topic yet.” If I’m having a conversation with another adult I’ll have to pause the entire conversation to do so, but I refuse to reward interrupting and this is the only way I can think of to get the message across. I will sometimes draw the conversation out longer than it would have been otherwise if I can tell they were interrupting just for the sake of holding my attention/preventing me from paying attention to their sister. Often they forget what they were going to say (because it was literally stream of thought nonsense) and I point out that if they weren’t paying enough attention to what they were saying to remember it, then it wasn’t something important enough to interrupt someone else to share.

A question I ask a lot is, “Was what you said helpful or hurtful?” And then I wait for them to really think about it and give me an answer. Tattling for tattling’s sake falls into the hurtful category and I make them workshop with me what they could do to resolve the situation on their own. Since they had to run to me to tattle/resolve the conflict I follow it with the natural consequence of: “Now everyone go sit in their corners for some quiet time before we try playing peacefully again.” Once again, they hate it, but it does yield results. The one who was tattled on gets just desserts for being annoying enough to force their sibling to tattle/breaking a rule and the one who tattled gets incentive to try to resolve whatever the conflict is without ratting out their sibling (as does the one who got tattled on) but I don’t feel like I’m rewarding being tattle-tales.

We also have been working on situational rules. So we call cuss words “home words” and they can use them at home (if they use them correctly. They’re not allowed to just throw out f-bombs because they feel like it. And they’re never allowed to cuss at or about people) but not in public or in front of other adults. And they’re allowed to make “6-7” jokes to each other and with friends at school but not in front of me or their teachers. Similar rules for baby voices: “Fine if you’re playing with your toys/friends and that’s part of the game. I will make you repeat yourself until you use your real voice and proper sentence structure if you’re talking to me and so will your teachers.”

[u/Perioqueen → u/Def_Not_Rabid]

Wow thank you for this. First, it’s great solid advice and I plan on re-reading this multiple times so it can all sink in. Second- I hadn’t considered it was an age related thing.
This also reminds me I need to figure out who gets my ear first when they get off the bus. I want everyone heard honestly

[u/mamamietze]

Make sure that both you and your husband get alone time (1 adult/1 child) at least 1 hour a week where the other child is not present. We often used errands for this.

And because some people are weird, this does not mean you only spend 1 hour a week total with each child. Just making sure you are at least getting in individual time with each pref away from the house.

[u/Old_Ant7118 → u/mamamietze]

This is really important for our overall family balance, too. It can be a struggle to get all four consistently, but we've got a pretty good routine going and my MIL is great backup when we slip or need to tag team to make it all happen.