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Dealing with one newborn is tough enough.

Dealing with two sounds like the stuff of nightmares.

I’m speaking for myself here. I’m sure the parents of twins were thrilled when they found out they were getting two kids in one go.

There are now more twin parents than ever before, according to new research compiled from surveys of birth records from more than 100 countries around the world, finding that there has been a substantial rise in twin birthrates.

The study, reported in The Guardian, concluded that one in 42 people is now born a twin, equivalent to 1,6 million children a year.

This means that the global twin birthrate has risen by a third over the past 40 years, from nine to 12 per 1 000 births since the 1980s.

But researchers don’t think the trend will continue, declaring that we may have reached “peak twin”.

“The trends are really quite striking,” said Christiaan Monden, a professor of sociology and demography at Oxford University.

“Over the past 40 to 50 years we’ve seen a strong increase in twinning rates in rich, developed countries, and that has led to more twins in both a relative and an absolute sense than we’ve seen ever before.”

Identical twins happen when a fertilised egg spontaneously splits in half. Non-identical twins are formed when the mother releases two eggs at once and both are fertilised. Identical twins are rarer, while rates of non-identical twins are reaching new highs.

Most twins these days happen as a result of fertility treatments, such as ovarian stimulation or having more than one in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

Africa has the highest rate of twins born without hormone treatments or IVF.

“The absolute number of twin deliveries has increased everywhere except South America,” Monden said.

“In North America and Africa, the numbers have increased by more than 80%, and in Africa this increase is caused almost entirely by population growth.”

Raj Mathur, the chair of the British Fertility Society and a consultant gynaecologist at St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, isn’t fazed.

“It doesn’t surprise us that twinning rates have increased because the availability of assisted reproduction has increased and also because women are slightly older when they have their first children, and both those things will increase the twin rate.”

As long as you don’t find them holding hands at the end of a corridor asking you to play with them forever and ever, things should work out fine.

[sources:guardian]