The squabbles would last for hours, days even, and there would be shouting and tears. Michele, my older sister, and I would be sent to separate rooms. I can still hear my mother’s words: “If you two don’t stop arguing, I’ll bang your heads together – that might knock some sense into you.” All these years later, I wonder if there’s a less drastic way of stopping the constant bickering and sibling rivalry that goes on between my children, aged 13, 11 and seven. If history repeats itself, we’re in for the long haul – my arguments with Michele didn’t cease until I’d had my first child.

Suzie Hayman, agony aunt and author of Parenting Your Teenager, says whether your children are six or 16, the reasons they squabble are pretty much the same. “The reality most of the time is that it’s not about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher or who’s got control of the remote. Far more likely is that one sibling is feeling pushed out, or put upon. Unable to articulate their feelings, they take it out on a brother or sister instead,” she says.

“Teenagers are apprentice adults: on the one hand they’re desperate to pull away from authority, on the other they’re still finding their way. And in the dynamics of a hectic family, everyone is forever frozen in the pecking order – be that the older sensible and sensitive child or the youngest spoilt and wayward one.”

How true – I’m the last of six, the in-your-face madam who got away with murder. Michele, 20 months my senior, can still remember rocking my pram to make me cry because she was so jealous I’d arrived and usurped her position.

Hayman doesn’t bat an eyelid. “Of course,” she explains. “We are still children, in many ways, until we become a parent ourselves.”…