"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.

It’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.

“It was about a mile, and I remember walking slowly, trying to stretch it out and make it last a bit longer,” he recalls.

“My friends had dashed home, eager to start their festive celebrations, but I was just crying inside, thinking about these two weeks I had coming up, with 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 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.

“I think loving homes are like magnets, children don’t want to leave them, whereas in those years I’d find any reason I could to get to school early, and stay late, getting really depressed around the holidays.

“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 had happened to us, and gain some acceptance of that situation.

“As you get older, you realise that so much of your behaviour is just covering for all the trauma that’s inside you.

“We were ready now, as adults, to start processing what had happened to us. We didn’t have the best start, but we were determined not to let it dictate the rest of our lives.

“We drew on the hard lessons we’d learned, and our experience of the care system - as well as our nearly 40 years professional experience working with young people and families - and set about building an organisation to help those in similar situations.”

The brothers joined forces to launch the now-award winning youth organisation Smash Life, offering their own inspirational talks, training, group work, and mentoring to young people and professionals, calling on their unique insight into real life lived within the care system.

Matt, aged 39, adds: “I think it’s very easy to scapegoat social workers. The truth is, when you’re working in complex family dynamics and situations, it requires a team of people to unpick it, not just one lone professional out on the field.

“We’ve taken the message of a story that isn’t nice to listen to, and pulled out the hope and positivity. Today, we carry out training in universities, with organisations, and at foster care conferences.” More recently, the pair were contacted by their former social worker, who revealed that she was left ‘haunted’ by her part in finding the boys’ foster home all those years before.

MATT SAYS: “MEETING UP WITH OUR FORMER SOCIAL WORKER FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1991/92 WAS A BIG DEAL FOR US. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME AN ADULT ACTUALLY APOLOGISED TO US FOR WHAT HAPPENED.”

The email dropped into Andy’s inbox as he sat with his wife and two children, and he describes the moment as knocking him off his feet. “I went upstairs and cried,” he says.

“We never expected anybody to reach out to us after all these years.”

The pair reveal that their memories of the social worker, and the time she spent with them, were positive, so they were happy to accept her invitation.

“We met in a small pub near us, and I think she was a little nervous - we all were - but we were quick to put her mind at ease,” says Andy.

“We explained that, of course, we had questions about that time, but that we were really just looking forward to catching up.

“It was an emotional conversation, but also really cathartic for us all.”

Speaking about their own relationship today, the brothers reveal they’ve come a long way from the angry teenagers, and broken twenty-somethings they once were.

“We haven’t had a cross word in three years, because we both understand why we’re here, we have purpose,” says Matt, who lives in Telford with his fiancée, a short drive from Andy and his family in Shrewsbury.

“Our aim is to give young people what we needed growing up: somebody who cares, and will fight for them. Smash Life is continuing to evolve and expand, and our team is growing, but the one thing that never changes is the idea that the child is the most important thing, and at the centre of all we do.

Andy agrees: “That’s why we do what we do. “Christmas is a good time to really stress that, to all those professionals out there, that children only get their childhood once.

“They deserve to be in a place, at this time of year, where they can just focus on being children, and the excitement of what the season may bring.”

Matt and Andy with their older brother Richard

The Smash Life team out on a wellbeing walk

Matt and Andy collecting their Mayor of Shrewsbury Gold Award