CHILDREN GET ONE CHILDHOOD LET’S HELP MAKE IT A GOOD ONE” Brothers Matt and Andy Smith reveal how they turned their negative start in an abusive foster home, into a positive future for children across the UK.
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t’s been nearly three decades, but Matt Smith can still vividly remember his walk home from school at the start of the 1994 Christmas holidays.
fresh start for us both,” says Matt. “Instead, we spent the next eight years being physically and emotionally abused by our foster parents - nearly a decade of our lives that would impact everything that came after it.
“It was about a mile, and I remember walking slowly, trying to stretch it out and make it last a bit longer,” he recalls. “I think loving homes are like magnets, children don’t want to leave them, “My friends had dashed home, eager whereas in those years I’d find any to start their festive celebrations, but I reason I could to get to school early, was just crying inside, thinking about these two weeks I had coming up, with and stay late, getting really depressed around the holidays. no chance of escaping to school. “These are the memories that don’t leave you, they stay with you, and this time of the year can be a trigger.” Matt and his younger brother, Andy, were taken into care in 1987, when they were aged just five and four. Three years later, they were finally placed together in what they believed would be their ‘forever home.’ “We’d come from a home with a lot of neglect and drug use, so our new foster home should have signalled a
“I’D GO TO FRIENDS’ HOUSES, AND SEE HOW RELAXED AND HAPPY THEY WERE WITH THEIR PARENTS, AND IT MADE ME ANGRY TO SEE THOSE AROUND US GETTING A LOT OF LOVE, WHILE MATT AND I WERE GETTING NOTHING.” After each being kicked out of their foster home when they turned 16, the brothers said they experienced a lot of pent-up anger, low self-
esteem, and feelings of loneliness and suicidal thoughts. This culminated in several brushes with the law, failed relationships, overwhelming debt, and bouts of violence, anxiety, and depression. In their twenties, the pair rarely spoke, but each of them individually gravitated towards working with children, taking on various youth and community support roles. In their thirties, they finally reached out to one another. “We’d hated each other as teenagers, as we were banned from communicating, and made to fight each other as part of our abuse,” says Andy, who is now 38. “In our twenties, spending time together had brought back painful memories, and we hadn’t known how to repair our relationship. That 15 years apart gave us the time and the distance we needed to deal with what
