Parents of middle school and adolescent age twins often do not understand why one twin wants to break away from the other. They describe behavior like: One twin becomes a Goth, one loses weight, one gains weight, one decides to hang around with a fast crowd, the other one loses interest in their studies. One decides, "I just don't like being a twin anymore." Parents are so confused because they've lived so much of their life with twinship being such a prized possession and all of a sudden the twins begin to explain it like it's and imprisonment or a bondage. Parents are confused about how to handle this and what they do, often times, is try to talk the compliant twin into persuading the more rebellious twin to stop this behavior. This strategy, of course, will not work. What will work is parents have to understand that this is a developmental phase, when their children are looking for and searching for a non-twin identity. It's part of a developmental push towards individuation.