Moms of Twins Are Begging You to Stop Asking this Question

Perhaps it’s because I grew up with a complicated relationship with my much younger sister, but I always thought it would be magical to be an identical twin, to have somebody who shared not only your birthday, but your entire DNA. When I met twins, I felt myself dying to ask: Did they have a secret language? Could they read each other’s minds? 

Over the years, I learned that it was tacky to bombard people with these types of questions. No twin wants to be grilled about if they share a brain or if their husbands can tell them apart. And then, when I had kids myself, I discovered there were questions parents of twins find equally eyeroll-inducing. (You’d be surprised how many clueless people flat-out ask women if their twins are the result of IVF.) 

But there was one question they apparently get asked all the time that really takes the cake: Which twin is older? 

I chatted with several twin moms as well as Susan Dominus, award-winning journalist and author of the forthcoming The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success (and a mother of twin boys, herself) to find out why this question is problematic and how parents of twins can address it when it comes up.

Susan Dominus has worked for the The New York Times since 2007, first as a Metro columnist and then as staff writer with The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize, for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She is the recipient of the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award, and the Mychal Judge “Heart of New York” award from the National Press Club. A graduate of Yale University, she has studied as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health and Yale Law School. Her article, The Covid Drug Wars That Pitted Doctor vs. Doctor, was included in the 2021 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing. In 2024, she won a National Magazine Award for service journalism for an article she wrote about menopause. She teaches journalism at Yale University.

For starters, it’s a stupid question. “Is being ‘older’ by a minute really older? No, not in any impactful way,” says Elinor Hutton, mom of 6-year-old twins, who reports getting asked it about 30 percent of the time when introducing her kids. “And why is being older by a minute significant to random people? My kids were delivered by a C section—so it was arbitrary who was removed first and when anyway.” 

Dominus agrees, and thinks it can also add an uncomfortable layer of hierarchy. “I suspect that many parents of twins—including me!—feel that the question has a subtext that no parent would want to answer—which is who's the more ‘senior’ or ‘dominant’ twin?” 

This idea of coded and permanent family roles can play out problematically between siblings of any age gap. (“She’s the pretty one, I’m the smart one...”) But Dominus says it does twins a particular disservice, because their relationship to each other and the world will and should change as they grow. “Whatever dynamic you think is baked in, you'd be surprised. It often changes over time. Sometimes one twin does seem to be the more mature one; a few years later, that will switch,” she notes.   

Anne Cloudman, a mother of 10-year-old identical twins, was particularly attuned to the way the question landed when her girls were younger: “Identical twins already struggle so much with being seen as individuals. Calling attention to this one concrete measurable difference so frequently made it seem like if my girls knew the answer, it could become a central part of their identity. Kids are really developing their personalities at ages 4 to 5, and the idea that this totally irrelevant data point would become important was alarming to me.”

Ultimately, that’s up to the parent, but many of the women I spoke to said they either deflect or politely refuse to answer. “Neither is older—they are twins, they were born on the same day,” responds Hutton, while Dominus has been known to offer up an, “It was such a blur, I don't remember!"  

Others take a more direct approach, sharing that their kids don’t know the answer themselves, for the reasons above.  

Bottom line: Parents of twins shouldn’t feel they owe it to anybody to answer this question, however well-meaning it may be.

Dominus is quick to say that she doesn’t think knowledge of who was delivered first is “particularly meaningful,” and that her own 18-year-old twins don’t know themselves. Instead, she stresses, what may matter most is how the story is told. “Sometimes ob-gyns deliberately deliver first the twin who is more at-risk or lower birth weight—that has to feel different from being the twin who just popped out first,” she says. “So obviously what also matters is how parents tell the story and what details they include. Is it ‘Max was really raring to go and beat you to the world first’? Or is the information delivered more neutrally, with little emotional heat or significance?” 

For instance, Rachel Johnson, a mom to 7-year-old fraternal twins, likes having the “birth order” narrative as part of her children’s known history and has been intentional in her telling of it. “My son is exactly 15 minutes older, and we do talk about it. We say his sister wasn’t really ready to leave, but he wanted to get out to meet his brother! It never bothered me that they knew this is. It’s just part of our family story.” 

One idea Cloudman floated was waiting to tell her kids until their late teens, when their identities are more firmly established, an approach made popular by a recent viral TikTok video of 18-year-old triplets learning their birth order. “My girls ask me maybe once a month about it, but we’ve been very clear with them that they won’t find out for a long time,” Cloudman says, admitting that the secrecy might be part of the allure for them. “That said, they do know that the answer is on their birth certificates, so if they get clever in their teens, they can probably access that themselves.”