(Strip Number 7221, Original Publication Date, 20 July 1986)
Panel 1: We start things off with malicious infant Mike using a hand-mirror to show Lizzie that he's sticking his tongue out at her.
Panel 2: Lizzie yowls that Mike is looking at her.
Panel 3: We start the real strip with Mike and Liz beating the crap out of each other because she ratted him out.
Panel 4: Instead of doing something that the horrible child care books tell her to do and ask what the Hell is happening, Imbecile Elly imposes a twenty-minute time out on the two of them.
Panel 5: When they don't immediately click their heels together, say "Yes, mother" and march off to their rooms whining about how cruel they were to her, she ups the time out to half an hour.
Panel 6: When they try to explain what the other did, she adds two days without television to the sentence.
Panel 7: When Mike and Liz argue about whether she was bothering him, Elly sentences them to a thirty minute time out, no television for two days and no allowance next week.
Panel 8: The children finally realize that they're actually being punished for trying to commit the horrible, cruel and selfish atrocity of trying to make their poor, ill-used mother care about what they're arguing about and go into full-on gobsmack mode.
Panel 9: Since they realize that they cannot hope to defeat such a clever negotiator as Elly, the children go to their rooms to start their totally earned and not at all arbitrary and stupid punishment.
Panel 10: Now the kids have shut up, Elly grins as she thought bubbles that sanctions work.
Summary: As I've said before, this smug refusal to want to listen to the children because of the imbecilic need she has to equate it with talking back to her is the engine that drives their animosity. Since she values the negative peace of having them being made to shut up to the positive peace of getting them to get along because it leads to the dangerous idea that she is why chaos happens is why she wrings her hands about their inexplicable animosity in the here-and-now and will wonder why they only ever started to get along in their early thirties.