Hi, there. Today, I’m going to talk to you about some common problems teens often have at school. First of all, almost every teen has problems with their friends. It’s normal for friends to have problems from time to time and it happens a lot at school, but when you do, it can make you feel sad and unhappy. The full details of what these problems are will be different for everyone. Maybe you are arguing, maybe your friend is happy to see you one day and not so happy the next or maybe your friend is talking about you to other people. It’s not really important what the problem is, it’s how you feel and what you do about it that is important. I had problems like this at school and I was always worrying about it. I found out the best thing to do is to talk to your friend and tell him or her how what they are doing makes you feel. This way, they can understand and change what they are doing and try to be kinder. Another problem with friends is peer pressure. This is when your friends are doing things they shouldn’t be doing, and they are trying to get you to do them, too. These can be bad things like smoking, drinking or stealing or it might be other things that you don’t want to do or that your parents say are wrong like hanging out in the park after school instead of going straight home. Anyway, peer pressure can be awful. You don’t want to get into trouble, but you don’t want to lose your friends. So what should you do? Well, you should stand up to peer pressure and do what you think is the right thing. You shouldn’t do anything you don’t want to do. Bullying is another one of the main problems teens have at school. A bully is a person who hurts another person or makes them feel frightened. They can use hurtful words or they might hit you. This problem is very serious and you should tell a teacher and your parents about it. This didn’t happen to me, but I knew it was happening to someone else and I told the teacher about it to make it stop. Finally, something that is a problem for everyone at some time or another is stress. Stress brings other problems with it, too, like not eating or not sleeping. Stress can come from any of the problems I talked about already or from exams, tests or something else. When you have stress, you should talk to someone about it. You should also try to make it go away by playing a sport or doing some exercise as well as eating well and getting as much sleep as you can. When I felt stressed, I went running in the park and that helped me a lot. Now my middle school years are behind me, I know that a lot of things I was worrying about are simple to fix and don’t really matter all that much anyway.