Parenting Tips from Neil Patrick Harris

Neil Patrick Harris knows how to deal with children, even though he and his partner David Burtka are only parents for 15 months. He has a knack that he had learned from his parents.

Harris treats his and Burtka’s twins, boy Gideon and girl Harper, born in October 2010, as if they were his peers – as he told PEOPLE. That’s the attitude his father and mother took with him and his brother, he recalled. They used to talk to them “like we were regular people and not babies.”

Consequently the actor and magician never uses baby talk but talks to his twins as if they understood everything and are just temporarily unable to respond.

He rejoices in the company of his babies whom he describes as the perfect young ones to raise the man’s spirits – “huggy, clingy, head-on-shoulders,” giving Harris, 38, and Burtka, 36, “fantastic” experience.

Last weekend, nevertheless, the couple took leave of the babies to attend Audi’s Penthouse party on Friday night and then the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, Ind.

Before they left Harris tweeted that he was all agog to explore the place and spend a Super Bowl weekend and just didn’t know what to begin with. He thought of going to a football game on Sunday, but had a sudden change of heart on the eleventh hour.

There were crowds everywhere, he shared with PEOPLE, telling he lost the desire to hang about the town. “It’s madness.” What he seemed to have preferred was a quiet evening with a book.