|
Being a parent of a teenager always has its challenges, but sometimes severe problems arise and parents need support to help their child turn their life around.
For one Western New York family, the turn from good to bad took just three short weeks. Timothy and Maripat Downey saw their son Matthew’s life make a turn for the worse when his friends left town during his sophomore year of high school. Matthew got involved with a new group of friends and subsequently got involved with drugs.
Matthew struggled with drugs for the next six years of his life, while his parents enrolled him in numerous programs and services to try to get his life back on track and out of the shackles of drug use.
“We tried many services and nothing worked,” said Downey. “We tried everything and lost a lot of money in the process.”
Eventually Timothy and Maripat convinced Matthew to get his GED (high school equivalency) through Catholic Charities’ Tomorrow’s Youth Today program, and that’s when his life began to turn around.
The program worked – Matthew got his GED, and now lives and works in New York City, plays percussion in a world music group and plans to attend college in the fall.
“What affected him was the program at Catholic Charities,” said Timothy, “The Tomorrow’s Youth Today program made the difference in his life. It reached him. It contacted him, and none of the other programs did that.”
|