was happening. The latter generally happens to children who are too young to understand sexual implications and boundaries. Weihe suggests that four criteria should be used to determine if questionable behavior is rivalry or abusive. First, one must determine if the questionable behavior is age-appropriate, since children use different conflict-resolution tactics during various developmental stages. Second, one must determine if the behavior is an isolated incident or part of an enduring pattern: abuse is, by definition, a long-term pattern rather than occasional disagreements. Third, one must determine if there is an "aspect of victimization" to the behavior: rivalry tends to be incident-specific, reciprocal, and obvious to others, while abuse is characterized by secrecy and an imbalance of power. Fourth, one must determine the goal of the questionable behavior: the goal of abuse tends to be embarrassment or domination of the victim. Risk factors There are several important risk factors associated with sibling abuse. They can be categorized into family system, parenting behavior, individual, and other risk factors. Family system This category of risk factors associated with sibling abuse looks at the family system as a whole. It includes negative and conflictual parent-child relationships, parental hostility toward a child, spousal abuse, partner conflict, marital conflict, mother's marital dissatisfaction and negative emotional expressiveness, maternal self-criticism, financial stress, low family cohesion, family disorganization, and household chaos, husband's losses of temper, low maternal education, and family triangulation. Parenting behavior This category of risk factors associated with sibling abuse examines the parenting behavior of adult caregivers. It includes parental differential treatment of children, fathers favoring later-born sisters, active and direct judgmental comparison, parents labeling their children "bad-good" and "easy-difficult", low parental involvement, particularly by fathers, ineffective parenting, inconsistent discipline, coercive parenting, maternal coercive, rejecting, and over-controlling behaviors, parental abuse of children, parent's use of violence to resolve parent-child conflict, parental neglect and approval of aggression, corporal punishment, not providing supervision, not intervening in sibling conflict, not acknowledging child-voiced claims of maltreatment, not reinforcing pro-social behaviors, and restricting children's efforts to diversify interests and specialization. Individual This category of risk factors associated with sibling abuse considers individual traits of the offender child and the victim child. For offender children, known individual risk factors include lack of empathy for victims, aggressive temperament, lower or higher self-esteem than peers, unmet personal needs for physical contact in emotion-deprived environments, experience of victimization, including by siblings, sibling caretaking of younger