My sister and i were 3 1/2 year apart and of very different personalities and we squabbled terribly; we really just couldn’t sort it out. I needed my space and she wanted to be played with and if i wouldn’t then she just beat me round the head by setting about annoying me.

If you are taking an emotional step away and really want thoughts then i’d say that i think that in an effort to compensate for not being at home all the time, you over-indulge you children’s’ neediness at times and that perhaps that is contributing to them now not being very good at allowing for each other. While i don’t set any great store by my own parenting, and frankly i’m not suggesting you mirror it, perhaps it would be worth looking at whether by always cuddling and sympathising with the very smallest slight/bump you are actually not encouraging them to develop an ability to just forgive under their own steam? SB is pretty big now and while i’m far from thinking bullying is good from the soul, she is old enough to encompass the idea that occasionally you just walk away from something or decide not to require the UN getting involved? I know you have always tried to do a “quick kiss and cuddle and now it is over” technique but actually i do think you are very very soft (ie very very loving and sympathetic) when it comes to moving SB in particular past things.

Perhaps it is time for a slightly tougher love approach, consistently, so they begin to work these things out for themselves. I do recall being mildly reproved by both Alison and Sarah for always wading in on my kids; sibling bickering IS part of growing up and they do need to find their way through it, though preferably with enough back up that they do find a way through it, which i feel my parents didn’t, to the detriment of my sister and my relationship.

I did take note of A and S because they have children directly older than mine (who i like and approve of!) and i did try to take a conscious step in the direction of helping them to manage it. I never went down the “wait till you have no hair left before you stop tearing it out of each others heads” but i did do some different things. I suppose my route was more that i tried to put in place some consequences so obvious that they’d learn to stop before i *had* to get involved.

Now i vary between
“Please will you listen to how you are speaking to each other?”

“Please will you consider stopping that behaviour before i have to get involved”

and

“Please will you think very hard about what is going to happen next if you carry on with this?”

If it does carry on i do any/all of the following.

*Tell them they have now made me very unhappy and that i am therefore now officially cross and that it is time to fix it.

*Stand them separately by a wall (this is when it really goes too far!) and tell them that they cannot move or speak for 5 minutes.

*Take away the thing that the fight is about with absolutely no conversation/reproof or come back.

*If i get a complaint which is mainly just tell tale and designed to get someone into trouble when it has clearly been 6 of 1, i ask that person if they actually want me to tell the person off and if they’ve thought about the consequences? If they have and they do (normally bluff then really!) and i know both of them deserve it, they both get told off and punished equally and then i point out that if they’d a) not been horrid and b) not come whining, they wouldn’t have got punished.

*Sometimes i just wade in and say that as i am now sick of listening to it and that i’ve given them a few minutes to fix it and i’m now giving them no opportunity to continue and i sit them down with something tedious. If it is towards bedtime i normally say that people go straight to bed with lights off so no books.

*I’ve been known to turn off tv/computer/ send people to lie on their beds or simply say that they’ve worn me out with it and my facility to do nice things is now over and therefore no bed time story etc.

*If it happens while i am sitting with them, over a book or something, i just sit still and silent until they stop and it sinks in they are being vile and then give them pointed looks.

In all honesty, mine don’t bicker a lot and i’ve not used any of those things more than a few times (well aside from “listen to how you are speaking to each other”. I’d consider Josie too little really to be expected to do anything other than retaliate if the others were doing it but all the others i think are big enough to know this is simply not how people treat each other if they love them or even like them. I’ve tried to be a combination of tough love and hands off about it in the last couple of years which seems to have been largely successful but then, if bickering isn’t our problem, then a lack of common sense is, so maybe i just created different issues!!! I do know they are far from perfect.

I do think my kids skins have thickened a bit since i stopped always wading in and trying to solve it and i do think they understand what is right and wrong about sibling behaviour. Of course it escalates at times but mostly now they will try to negotiate. I think that because we have some simple tents to live by (if you are being horrid you are tired and therefore need less time with us, not more, if you are horrid we will not wish to be with you, if you are horrid i will not give you attention) then the behaviour lines are fairly drawn.

I’m an eldest and i know it stinks at times but actually i do expect my bigger kids to show the way with this; they’ve been around longer, they’ve got more experience and they have some self control about stopping before things get silly. If Fran (and occasionally she does!) loses control and hits or squeeze in frustration, she’ll be in more trouble than if the 4 year old does. Which isn’t to say that i won’t tell Josie off for being annoying.

Our biggest thing here tends to be “what shall we watch?” and i do grit my teeth and wait till they agree. It isn’t fair for it to always be one persons choice and they do have to find agreement and i just try to let them, on the basis that it is good negotiation practise. I suppose that is what bickering is really and the trick is helping them to find un-mentored resolution as well as discovering the consequences of not being able to do that. I guess in your tv/cuckoo case i’d be tempted to either have nothing or just wait it out till they found a compromise and then congratulate them for it.

I was talking to my sister at the weekend about something different and were we agreeing really that the consequences of it was an adult who either couldn’t cope if they didn’t get their way or had no friends because they didn’t learn that sometimes you just won’t get your way. This is a life skill that school probably DOES equip you with, not necessarily in the best way, but turn taking and the consequences of being vile are pretty blatant there.

I’ve got a feeling that this is going to sound lecture-y or critical and i don’t mean it to at all; i am amazed by all the stuff you do with your girls and think they are lovely – but i suppose i do think that mostly when i want to alter something in my girls it is because *I* need to alter a bit so i hope something in there helps.

Perhaps it is about trying to give them quality time to themselves, but also it will have, sometimes, to be that they just have to get along and they’ll have to learn that too.

Hugs – I hate the bickering, the stropping, the wailing and all the rest of it.