By Depaul UK Reconnect worker, Kerry
When I was 16, my relationship with my mum broke down. For the next two years, I moved between friends’ sofas and my grandmother’s house, never feeling settled or secure.
Looking back now, I can see it from my mum’s perspective. She did try. But she didn’t have enough support, and neither did I.
Today I’m a Reconnect Worker, helping other families avoid what mine went through. I sit down with young people and their families when things at home are breaking down and help them find a way to talk to each other again, before a young person feels like leaving is the only option.
That’s the thing about youth homelessness: it rarely starts with someone leaving home. It starts much earlier, when relationships become strained, and families no longer know how to communicate. Family breakdown is the leading cause of youth homelessness in the UK, often driven by financial worries, poor mental wellbeing, and the kind of social and cultural pressures that build up over years. Catch it early enough, with the right support, and it doesn’t have to end in crisis.
I started at Depaul UK running workshops in schools and higher education, helping students recognise the warning signs of family breakdown and know where to turn when tensions at home grow. The workshops open up honest conversations and are often the first time a young person feels able to say out loud that something’s wrong.
And, when home becomes really difficult, we can refer them into our family mediation service Reconnect, where I work now. Together, our education workshops and Reconnect help us step in before a family reaches crisis point, giving young people and families the support they need before homelessness becomes a reality.
Every family I sit with is different, but I usually start the same way: meeting the young person on their own first, helping them find words for feelings they’ve never had to explain before. I teach them simple “I feel…” statements – I feel like this when you do this, and this is what I’d like instead. For a lot of teenagers, it’s the first time anyone’s given them the language to say what’s actually going on.
We’re not teaching them to avoid conflict. We’re teaching them how to argue well – to disagree without it destroying everything.
One of the most useful tools I have is saying nothing at all. Everyone feels like they have to fill a silence; I will just sit there. Giving a young person time to think, process, and find the right words shows them that what they have to say matters. For many, it’s the first time they’ve truly felt listened to. A lot of young people don’t feel heard by adults. So much of the feedback I get is ‘I felt heard’. It’s often all it takes to start the change.
One young person has stayed with me more than most. I met her during a school workshop when she was 14. She was quiet, withdrawn, and slow to open up. Then one week she stopped coming.
Her friends told me she’d argued with her grandmother, who was her main carer, and gone back to her mum’s, where there was a history of violence. We referred her into Reconnect.
After spending time with the family and lots of listening, it became clear the difficulties went deeper than the conflict at home. She was struggling badly at school and had tried to say so, but had been told she was fine. Through the local authority, I helped her get an advocate, and that changed things: her teachers finally understood what was going on, she got a time-out pass for lessons, and her homework was cut down to something she could actually manage.
Once the pressure at school eased, things calmed down at home too. She moved back in with her grandmother for good.
That Christmas, a local charity arranged gifts for children in need, and I delivered hers myself. She answered the door in her Christmas pyjamas, smiling and saying thank you. Her nana was over the moon. It was really lovely.
Every conversation is a chance to help a young person avoid the journey I went through myself. With the right support, early enough, relationships can be rebuilt, futures can be changed, and homelessness can be prevented before it ever starts. That’s why prevention is at the heart of everything we do.