My sister has 6-year old identical daughters, and they are amazing.
Sis and her hubby have usually dressed them separately, brushed their hair a little differently, but left to their own devices, they'll dress up as Twinsie-Winsies and do their hair up the same.
For a while, Sis and BIL made sure to buy them different clothes, but now they are old enough to care what they wear, now they ask for the same stuff a lot of the time. Sometimes Sis will say, "you're driving me nuts, one of you change socks or something," and they'll say, "awwww Mom, you always let HER wear the stuff she wants."
So finally Sis said, "the hell with it, if they want to wear the same things, as long as it's not all the time, I'm not gonna battle about it."
When they do that, I can't tell 'em apart. But I only see them once a month or so. My sister says, "I can tell, but I have to look close."
Their school has uniforms so they are gonna have to dress more or less alike to SOME extent whether Mom and Dad like it or not, although the principal has said to my sister there may be some "exemptions" made to the dress code "for the sake of the teachers' sanity."
They don't usually do the one-starts-the-other-one-finishes-sentences thing, but they CAN. Sometimes they do it to freak people out (it works).
In the last couple of years, as they've become more and more self-aware, they are really learning to play off of it. For a while, until they were 4 or so, they would just call each other "Sister," and my sis was worried maybe they were having some social adjustment problems (difficulty with self-differentiation), so they consulted a specialist.
The specialist came back, "They know exactly what they're doing. To put it in adult terms, they're screwing with you." My sis and her hubby sat down and said, "Girls, we think you should call each other by name," and they said, "Oh, OK, we just thought you liked it when we said 'sister.' "
The specialist also said, "The identical twins who seem to have adjustment problems are the ones whose parents make a real big deal about it one way or the other -- either insisting they always dress the same, or that they NEVER do."
They still do the "Sister" bit once in a while because they know it freaks everybody else out. They are zooming through kindergarten at warp speed (already in 3rd/4th grade reading levels) so there's no worry on other academic fronts (their older brother and sister are in honors classes too. Meanwhile their 3-year-old baby sister won't watch Barney because "he's just too dumb").
Their kindergarten class is kind of small (about 16-18 kids, IIRC) but apparently they're having no problem making friends -- they don't just sit staring at each other all day. Apparently as a unit they take the lead in a lot of the playtime activities and the rest of the group joins in. When they get into grade school next year, they'll probably be in separate classrooms.
They're both "juniors" -- R. has my sister's name (handed down from my mother, who got it from her grandmother) while A. is the female version of her dad's name. They have distinct, but not clashing, personalities -- A. is more serious and disciplined, while R. is a bit more 'artistic' and expressive.
They're old enough they kind of understand the whole twin thing. It'll be interesting to see what happens when they get older. (They kind of slightly resemble Lindsay Lohan in "The Parent Trap" -- hopefully the resemblance will be visual and not behavioral.)
Seeing how they relate, I guess I can understand the women in the story.
But I certainly hope my nieces develop separate lives in their own right. My siblings and I are close (although none of us are twins), but we all live in separate cities, and I certainly hope when I go (as the oldest, I'll probably go first) they'll still have plenty of reason to go on.
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