Nothing can prepare you for the birth of twins.
From arguments over who wins in a fight between a tarantula and a wasp, whether Santa has an iPad or an iPhone, wee battles in the shower (“don’t cross the streams!“) to simultaneous LEGO building (this should be an Olympic sport), there is never a dull moment.
Giacomo and Carlo Massola running through Parliament House, Canberra, while attached to each other.Credit: James Massola
I speak from personal experience: my wife, Karen, and I welcomed twin boys back in 2018. We’ve never recovered.
And that’s before you get the poonami of nappy changes, balancing two on a breastfeeding pillow to feed, taking forever to leave the house, nits-related double head shavings and, worst of all, spending half an hour crammed into a shopping centre toilet with a couple of four-year-olds because “I really want to poo Papa but my poo doesn’t want to.”
Recently, our boys combined forces to lock Karen and me outside on our balcony so they could devour a pack of lollies. It took an emergency key to get back in the house.
If you thought having one kid was a lot, you ain’t seen nothing. And that’s before you get to proper multiples, like three, four or more.
Unlike the triplet Terriers on Bluey, our twins don’t speak in unison. Why would they, when it’s so much more fun to shout over each other?
We did everything we could to prepare, and were totally unprepared. But there is a serious point to this column, rather than just a dad’s lament.
Jams Massola feeding his new born twins in 2018Credit: James Massola
The Australian Multiple Birth Association has launched a report with some scary statistics: parents of multiples are five times more likely to have postnatal depression; nine times more likely to experience disabling exhaustion; half of all parents report difficulty finding childcare and two-thirds said childcare was unaffordable.
The costs are significant: when we had twins and their older sister in childcare, the total annual cost before the government rebate was nudging $90,000 a year.
Carlo, James and Giacomo Massola after a recent family dinner.Credit: James Massola
The association estimates that 20 per cent of mothers of multiples returned to work within three years, compared to 40 per cent for mums of single babies. By not going back to work, women miss out on accruing superannuation, on progressing their career and on having regular contact with other adults (which is arguably better for mental health than endless episodes of Bluey and fights over LEGO).
These disparities are a subset of a much bigger issue – the gender pay gap and structural inequalities between men and women in work. Not everyone wants to go back to work and that’s fine, but everyone should have a choice.
The association has a serious request: include twins, rather than just triplets or more, in the government’s multiple birth allowance payment. (My wife and I would not qualify for this as it is means-tested above a household income of $80,000 and we both work full-time).
Last time I checked, twins are multiple babies.
Parents with triplets are eligible for a multiple birth allowance payment of about $4807 annually, or about $185 a fortnight, while parents of quadruplets get $6406 (about $246 a fortnight).
That $185 a fortnight would not cover the cost of two $40 tins of formula and four $40 packs of 96 nappies. Extraordinarily, according to the Multiple Birth Association’s modelling, it’s likely the cost of administering the program is more than the actual payments.
About 740 families across Australia receive the triplets-plus payment each month (it runs until the age of 16) and about 40 eligible triplets or more are born in Australia each year. There are about 4200 multiple births each year in Australia, roughly 1.4 per cent of all births, and 98 per cent of those are twins.
The extra cost to taxpayers of making this means-tested payment to families of twins is estimated about $20 million a year.
This parliament may just be the most twins-friendly in history. Labor MPs Ged Kearney, Anika Wells, Anne Stanley, Jerome Laxale and Matt Thistlethwaite all have twins, their colleague Louise Miller-Frost has triplets, and Liberal MP Jenny Ware has twins, too. If this parliament can’t get it done, when will it happen?
In addition to expanding the payments to include twins families, Silje Andersen-Cooke, a lawyer, mother of triplets and director of the association, tells me there are two more requests for the Albanese government: an extra eight weeks of parental leave for each extra child born, which would cost $29 million annually, and access to in-home care for families with multiples, at a cost of about $39 million a year.
All told? $90 million per year. A rounding error in a $460 billion annual budget.
But expanding support for the tiny cohort of multiples families within Australia would provide mental health benefits for parents, caring benefits for kids and it would deliver a boost to the economic participation and financial security of mothers in the decades to come.
Surely, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – who came to power promising a more family-friendly government – and a parliament full of twins parents can implement these modest changes in the next federal budget?
James Massola is national affairs editor.
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