Virtual twins are children who are not genetically related but grew up together and are close in age. They can be created through adoption, and researchers study them to understand the relationship between genetics and environment. Virtual twins can provide insight into the nature versus nurture argument, and parents may choose to adopt them for various reasons, such as providing siblings for their children or helping with cross-cultural adoption. Life for virtual twins can be interesting, and they may face confusion or questions about their family dynamics.
Virtual twins are children who grew up together, but have no genetic relationship. They are also very close to each other in age, generally within nine months of each other. They can enter a family in a wide variety of ways and are a topic of interest to psychologists and other researchers, as they can be used to gain insight into the relationship between environment and genetics.
In a classic example of virtual twinning, a couple makes adoption arrangements after struggling to have children, and then becomes pregnant. Rather than forego adoption, parents may choose to adopt in addition to giving birth, by giving their natural child an adoptive sibling. Virtual twins can also be created through adoption, with parents adopting two children from different parents. Many researchers like to focus specifically on virtual twins adopted at very young ages, rather than older children adopted together.
For people interested in the nature versus nurture argument, virtual twins can provide some interesting food for thought. Researchers who believe that environment plays a bigger role than genetics would expect these twins to be very similar, since they grew up in the same environment. Studies suggest that they bear fewer similarities than true genetic siblings, however, which suggests that genetics play an important role in human development.
Life for virtual twins can be interesting. In the case of twins that look like the people who raised them, people can get confused about how they were born, which can sometimes be embarrassing in the case of a situation where a twin is adopted and a twin is born into the family. Children of different racial backgrounds obviously distinguish themselves as adopted, although parents adopting children of the same ethnicity may be asked by curious people whether the twins are from the same family, and this can sometimes get irritating.
Parents who believe that siblings play a valuable role in their children’s development may deliberately decide to adopt virtual twins. Parents participating in cross-cultural adoption may also choose to adopt virtual twins so their adopted children have a familiar face to interact with, in hopes of making their children feel less alienated from the foreign culture they were adopted into. Others may choose to adopt children of radically different ethnic backgrounds, for a variety of reasons.
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