World Homelessness Day: Preventing Youth Homelessness Starts at Home
Family relationship breakdown is a leading driver of youth homelessness in Scotland every year. This often stems from conflict between parents and teenagers, or friction between young parents navigating life together. Read on to explore how understanding teenage brain development and sleep science can help de-escalate conflict at home and strengthen family bonds.
Guest blog from Colin Waters
World Homelessness Day falls on Saturday 10 October this year. What role can families – and fathers – play in reducing homelessness figures?
The charity I work for, Cyrenians Scottish Centre for Conflict Resolution (SCCR) was set up in 2014 with a mission to reduce the level of youth homelessness in Scotland. Each year 5,000 young people present as homeless in Scotland. The leading cause of youth homelessness is relationship breakdown within families. Although our focus is on preventing young people leaving home, fathers (and mothers and carers) are as much our target audience as young people. We won’t be able to achieve our aim without bringing dads on board.
What fathers don’t often realise is the extent to which familial conflict is driven by teenage brain development. Many of the behaviours that parents and carers complain about – risk-taking behaviour, listening to peers more than parents, a desire for independence – have their roots in the changes taking place in young people’s brains during adolescence.
To give one example – parents and carers often complain about young people staying up and then sleeping late, citing this as an example of laziness. It’s not that, though.
Heard of melatonin? Basically, it’s a hormone produced by the brain that helps you get to sleep at night. For adults, melatonin production kicks in every evening when it starts to get dark. For teenagers, however, melatonin production starts and ends later, explaining the different sleep cycle.
So, what does this have to do with homelessness? Keep in mind that family conflict is rarely caused by a single argument, no matter how heated. More often, it grows from repeated misunderstandings that leave family members feeling unheard. When those tensions escalate, they can contribute to relationship breakdown and, in some cases, place young people at risk of homelessness.
To help fathers better understand what young people experience during puberty, SCCR created The Learning Zone, which can be accessed for free on our website. The Learning Zone helps parents and carers to understand the changes their teenagers experience during adolescence, how these changes can feed into family conflicts, and what dads can do to help de-escalate conflict at home.
World Homelessness Day gives us a moment to pause and reflect on homelessness in all its guises. While SCCR was created to combat youth homelessness, we’re not unaware that fathers, especially young fathers, can find themselves in danger of experiencing homelessness.
Homelessness figures recently released by the Scottish government don’t say how many fathers are homeless. A father may not appear in statistics as part of a household with children because the father is sofa surfing rather than rough sleeping or contact arrangements have broken down following separation.
Perhaps the key question isn’t ‘How many fathers are homeless?’, though, but ‘How many fathers are unable to maintain meaningful relationships with their children because they haven’t been able to secure shelter young people can visit and stay overnight in?’
The roots of homelessness often lie in relationships that have become disconnected or overwhelmed. By helping fathers understand the profound changes that take place during adolescence, and by giving families the tools to navigate conflict constructively, we can reduce the risk of those relationships breaking down. On this World Homelessness Day, that preventative work may be one of the most important contributions any of us can make.