David Law

Parent of KELY Programme Participant

"Don't forget what you were like as a teenager. A lot of parents are too intense and there's a lot of pressure. Teenagers eventually grow up and our job is to make sure they get through those years."

My parents taught me so much about life and parenting. They always stressed the importance of having a strong foundation and a sense of who we are as a family. That's something that I have carried with me into my journey as a parent.

My kids, who are all adults now, have their own WhatsApp group. When one of them does something wrong or gets into trouble, they first chat about it amongst their sibling group, then they'll eventually tell me about it. It's like a little support group amongst peers. They've helped each other through different issues, whether it's using drugs or alcohol or mental health.

I met my daughter when she was eight years old. Her biological father had died when she was only three, and I was dating her mother. When her mother passed away six years later, it was an administrative nightmare for me to gain custody of her. I wasn't her biological father, nor was I her adoptive father, so any authority as her guardian also died with her mother. It took a while to sort out all the legal paperwork for me to make sure she could stay with me.

As a teenager without her mother, she felt isolated and that no one loved her. She felt that she was a burden to me. Because of all of this, she acted out at home and at school. She was deliberately defiant and would blatantly lie to my face. She often refused to go to school and her grades slipped.

The turning moment happened when I took away her Octopus card. Her Octopus card was connected to my bank account, but she would max out the auto-recharge amount every other day, so I confronted her and took the card away. Without her Octopus card, she was afraid that her friends would think that she was poor and desert her. This incident triggered her to attempt to end her life by overdosing on painkillers. That day, she came home feeling sick and throwing up. She kept saying she had done something really bad, but she didn't want to tell me because she was afraid I would be angry. When I finally learned what had happened, I called an ambulance and took her to the hospital. The next day, the doctors recommended that my daughter start seeing a counsellor, but that they didn't have any availability for the next six months.

At that moment, I thought of KELY. I had known about the organisation from the very beginning, because a friend of mine was very involved, and I knew that KELY had done some work at my daughter's school. KELY was running a new programme, Growing Up with KELY, where they placed young counsellors in the school to provide emotional and psychological support to students who needed it. The counsellor was only a few years older than my daughter, so was able to connect with and help her. If there are other parents out there struggling with their kids, I would strongly recommend that they make contact with KELY, because their programmes work! The KELY counsellor gave my daughter a path forward.