DEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S MOM: I have an older sister who used to party a lot when she was in college and for a couple of years after she graduated. Now she spends most of her weekends during the summer totally hammered. It isn’t pretty, and last year she ended up with a DWI and a suspended license and court-ordered classes.

When anyone tries to tell her she has a real problem, she says she only drinks a lot in the summer, so she isn’t an alcoholic or anything like that.

As the person who sees her most weekends and got pulled into being her personal chauffeur while she had no license, I totally disagree. I keep telling her you can’t be just a parttime alcoholic. I think she takes after our dad, who still likes to party with his friends, but they are older and keep to beer mostly. My sister hits the harder stuff, and not long ago she admitted she’s gone to blackout a few times, but “always just in the summer.”

I don’t get why she thinks that’s an okay thing. To me she is an alcoholic and I don’t know how to get her help. How do you convince an alcoholic she is one? --- MY SISTER HAS A PROBLEM

DEAR MY SISTER HAS A PROBLEM: I agree with you that your sister very likely has a drinking problem based on what you said.

A good place for you to start would be finding help and guidance for yourself. Check out a local Al-Anon or other recognized support program for the loved ones of people suffering from addictions.

You could also reach out to other family members and friends of your sister to see if they have any ideas on how best to help her. Formal interventions appear to have mixed results, but just having a team ready to support you and your sister might not be a bad idea.

In the end, regardless of all you do to try and convince her, your sister is going to need to acknowledge and accept her condition and want to change it before she’ll be ready to seek help.

DEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S MOM: Why is it that I am the one who gets chewed out and made to feel guilty by my boss because I take one sick day to help take care of my grandma when my mom is out of town, yet the other guys in my department take off two or three times a month, and everyone knows they’re not sick? And even when they are around, they do half as much work as I do in a typical day. --- NOT FAIR

DEAR NOT FAIR: It may be that your boss knows you can be counted on to show up and get the work done, and so has to scramble more to cover your absence than is the case with your coworkers.

If that’s what’s behind your boss’s grouching at you, try taking it as something of a backwards compliment, born out of frustration with less reliable staffers than you.

DEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S MOM: My younger sister and I had our first babies within weeks of each other. The boys have been more like brothers than cousins, so there is no problem there, despite their having very different personalities. My nephew is smart, popular, and athletic. My son is also smart, but in a nerdy, quieter way, not at all into sports, and has only a couple of good friends, unlike my popular nephew. Both boys seem comfortable in their own skins and have done well in their first year of high school.

Now that the school year is over, though, I am looking forward to fewer postings by my sister about how incredible and superior her son is. She posts nearly every day. I almost never do, and when I do, it’s almost never about my kids’ achievements.

It also seems the timing of her posts just happen to coincide with my telling her something my son or his younger brother did that made me proud. I tell her, and within minutes of our talking or texting, there’s a new post about her son’s latest success, or that her fifth-grader just won some prize or other, or was singled out in class for some awesome accomplishment.

I never say anything to my sister, but I truly believe she feels some need to compete her kids against mine, and I just think that is so immature. Don’t you? --- STOP BRAGGING

DEAR STOP BRAGGING: I’m not sure it’s as much a display of immaturity as one of playing into the trend of selective social media sharing that makes it seem like some people are living in a perfect world, filled with only joyous events.

While there may be an element of an extension of sibling rivalry, it’s also possible this is just one of the things your sister does to help her feel good about herself and the job she’s doing as a parent.

Let her do her thing, and you do yours on social media and in the real world. It seems clear that just as your sons are very different people, so are you and your younger sister.