ABSTRACT
The sample of multiple birth children, some of them born prematurely and with low birth weight, gave the authors a unique opportunity to study the longitudinal development of such children in the most optimal of environmental circumstances. The fact of the multiple births made it necessary for multiple parenting in the first year of life, affording authors an opportunity to observe the effects of this in caring, giving, and nurturing families. There was a relatively consistent pattern for mental scores to increase above the level of the motor scale. There has been increased concern that the corrections for prematurity used with early developmental measures are ignoring later high risk effects. Mentions of symbiotic problems in the personality tests either with primary caretakers or between siblings as interferences with identity formation were few, and disappeared by the latest age studied.
