A New York mom is going viral for raising an important question about her twin girls.
Sophia Gilbert (@sophbgilbert) posted a reel on Instagram, where she calls out to her 8-month-old twin daughters—Charlotte and Alva—by name.
“CC?” She said, and both babies looked up at her. She tried again: “Alva?”—and once more, they responded to the name.
Baffled, Gilbert wrote on the text overlay: “How are twins supposed to learn their names?!”
The 27-year-old told Newsweek she had been curious about the issue when she was pregnant.
“I asked a friend of mine how his twins learned their names and he assured me that it wouldn’t be an issue and they would figure it out,” Gilbert said. “But when they first started to respond to words, I started to think about it again.”
Her experiment seemed to confirm that name recognition doesn’t come easily for twins. “It definitely proved that learning our names would be something to work on. They didn’t pick up on instantly,” Gilbert added.
She explained that the reel was recorded when the girls were 8 months old, but in the last three and a half months, Charlotte and Alva are learning to understand their names better.
“More often than not, they are answering to each other’s names,” Gilbert said. “Though part of me wonders if it’s because they are just nosy.”
Gilbert also shared that when the twins were first born, they would often produce the same test results and temperatures during their stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), but more recently, their individual personalities have started to shine through more.
“Charlotte is more about doing things, Alva is more analytical and likes to watch people do things,” Gilbert said. She and her husband Kevin, 28, say that the girls “take turns.”
“They both aren’t usually upset at the same time, or sleep [badly] on the same nights,” Gilbert said. “Both girls can be pretty dramatic, but rarely at the same time.”
Gilbert’s clip has gone viral on Instagram, amassing 2.7 million views on the platform. Hundreds left comments, many chiming in with suggestions for how her twins can learn their own names.
“The best way I let my twins know their names was by making eye contact while I talk to whomever I was calling. Now they turn around whenever I say their names, even when I am talking about them to my husband or anyone else,” one user wrote.
“It happened naturally with my twins. I guess because we looked at whoever’s name we would say. Don’t overthink it,” another added.
A third user wrote, “My parents sat me and my twin sister down when we were about 2 and told us our names and not to forget because everyone else would.”
To help them learn, Gilbert has been trying out different ways to help her twins tell their names apart.
“I have started to work on it more during one-on-one time,” she said. “If one baby is napping and the other is awake, I make sure to spend active time talking to them and telling them their name. I also sing the Ms. Rachel song, ‘Can you say mama, mama, can you say mama’s name?’ But I switch ‘mama’ out with their names.”
“I have also loved some of the suggestions, like dressing them differently,” Gilbert said. [“I’m] not sure how that would help them learn their name, but that made me giggle. My friend loved to watch the video with the sound off, she says it’s way funnier that way.”
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