One of the best parts of summer recess is the sudden absence of adult supervision. It’s less likely someone older is around ensuring that your bedroom door stays open or scolding you to “get to class.” There are places to sneak away to that the colder months don’t allow and no such thing as a school night that forces you to end your evenings early. These new circumstances won’t change things for everyone, but the extra freedom and opportunity might lead to extra fooling around.

With all of the skimpy bikinis, songs about summer love, and free time, you would think keeping up a romance when school isn’t in session would be a breeze. But dating during the summer months comes with its own challenges. If you’re about to take the relationship you started during the school year into the summer, do yourself a favor and think through how you’ll approach some of the difficulties that are rarely discussed. 

Advice…we get it from everyone: parents, teachers, friends, TV. But has anybody ever asked YOU for advice? We think you know a lot and we started to wonder just what kind of advice you'd give to a younger brother or sister who needed your expert guidance…

There’s nothing more annoying than being told what to wear.  When I was 15, if my mom or dad (or anyone else) told me that what I was wearing was too revealing I would roll my eyes and tell them to get a life: Seriously? Stay out of my business and find something more productive to worry about.  

Dances in high school are awkward enough on their own. With trying to pull yourself away from the snack table to join everyone else who seems to effortlessly dance so much better than you, pretending being dropped off by your mom doesn’t make you any less cool, and acting like you actually like all the dancey pop hits the DJ blasts that have already been played to death…well…school dances are a struggle. 

In high school we have teachers to help us through tough subjects, we have coaches to guide us to victory, and a lucky few of us have older brothers who are there to give us advice as we try to figure out girls, dating, and relationships. But I didn’t have an older brother and many of you might not either. In a previous post, Maritza noted that there was tons of information she never got from her older sister that might have prevented some stupid romantic mistakes. And now it’s my turn to imagine which words of wisdom would have been most helpful from an older brother. 

Although I have an older sister who I saw go through the turbulence and heartbreaks of relationships, she never actually gave me dating love and advice. And after having experienced my own share of relationship mistakes, I really wish my sister had given me some sort of advice that could have prevented the idiotic mistakes I made. Having gone through the troubles of relationships herself, I wish she would have sat me down and told me things about boys and how I should be treated in a relationship. There are many things I would have liked to be made aware of, and when the time comes, I plan on giving my younger sister a head's up on the four things I wish I would have learned from my older sister.

Like Taylor Swift said, "Cause when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them, and when you're fifteen feeling like there's nothing to figure out, well count to ten, take it in, this is life before who you're gonna be, fifteen."

I love my siblings and my friends, and I would do everything to prevent them from getting hurt physically and emotionally. There is so much advice that I would give to my siblings and my friends about relationships but the most important ones that I think they should are STIs, pregnancy, and rumors.