One of my four year-old twin sons wants to watch Dick Dastardly, the other his Robin Hood video. Sam belts Dexter on the forehead with the remote control – so hard, he propels backwards into a lamp.

‘Does your child do this?’ I ask friends constantly.
‘Well, not quite as much,’ a fellow mother admitted. ‘But then, April is an only child. She can hardly beat herself up. Mostly, she plays happily with her Lego.’

April, it seems, is in the minority. Children fight – period. And if you have same-sex children, three years or closer in age, better dig out the Savlon and cotton wool.

‘These children are most likely to be constantly compared – which contributes to sparring,’ says Helena Sharpstone, Communications Director at The Parent Company who run seminars on various aspects of parenting.

During my first two years of parenthood, I assumed that boys have a monopoly on fighting. Not so. April aside (grrr), I’ve witnessed countless three and four year-old girls yank hair and deliver accurate eye pokes. One teatime, two of my son’s female pals fought tooth and nail for the pink plate.

‘It’s by far the most stressful aspect of being a parent,’ said one of their parents. ‘Worse than potty training, fussy eating, waking in the night. I’m an intelligent, 36-year old woman – yet I can’t figure out a way to stop it.’

First, what doesn’t work…
Shouting, hitting back or trying to figure out what happened. Author and parenting guru, Dr Christopher Green, once pointed out that, you’d need to hire a team of detectives in order to find out who started it.

‘You don’t have to assign blame,’ says Helena Sharpstone. ‘If children are fighting, they are both out of order. What matters is how they are going to fix it.’

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Fighting talk