OK, so I have to voice this because the English teacher in me is screaming out to be heard. While I thought most of your ideas for getting siblings to work out problems were great (and several of them ones I'm going to tuck away myself for future reference), one of them made me cringe. Please don't use writing as a punishment. I am not saying this as a parent but as a teacher. Writing is one of those skills that sadly can be very difficult to develop in children. And to use it as a punishment really doesn't help. Now don't get me wrong. I've seen this used as a tool in terms of telling a child to go sit and write out some of his/her thoughts about what's going on, how s/he might be able to work towards a solutions, yadda, yadda. That's great. That's constructive, is helping the child learn to think for himself, process a situation and all that. But lines...not so much. Forcing someone to write for the sake of just repeating one thought...all that does is focus a child on how irritating the act of writing is. The words themselves tend to lose their meaning. My husband used to work at a children's psychiatric hospital, and that was one of their "instructional tools" was making these kids write lines when they broke the rules. End result, he's had those same kids who were supposed to be trying things like journeling, etc as tools to work on their thinking and as a positive form of expression (as opposed to the violence or other behaviors they had been using) tell him that they hated writing, especially after having to write lines for being bad. Just my two cents (for whatever it's worth!). Don't mean to offend or criticize anyone!