The intergovernmental agreement to implement the Thriving Kids program is a crucial milestone. Now the test is delivery – turning an announcement into an early-support system that families can actually use.
For more than a decade, Tom Insel sat at the centre of global mental health research. As director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, he oversaw extraordinary advances in genetics, neuroscience, brain imaging and molecular biology. By conventional standards, it was a golden era.
Yet when Insel stepped down, he was unsettled. Despite world-class research and unprecedented investment, outcomes for people living with serious mental illness had barely improved.
Hospitalisation, incarceration, homelessness and early mortality remained stubbornly high. Families continued to cycle through crisis, care and disappointment.
In his book Healing, Insel describes the moment this disconnect became impossible to ignore. While presenting scientific breakthroughs to families, a father of a young man with schizophrenia stood up and challenged him: “Our house is on fire and you’re telling me about the chemistry of the paint.”
It wasn’t a rejection of science. It was a demand that knowledge translate into lives that actually worked.
Insel’s conclusion was pragmatic rather than ideological. Biology mattered, but biology alone wasn’t enough.
What sustained recovery, he argued, were the everyday foundations of a life – people, place and purpose. Relationships that endure. Environments that stabilise. Roles that give meaning. Without these, even the best evidence struggled to shift outcomes.
Absorbing the lessons
That lesson lands with particular force in early childhood and developmental support.
Thriving Kids reflects a system beginning to absorb it. Rather than extending the NDIS by default, or waiting for certainty about permanence, Thriving Kids creates a complementary national pathway of early support for children under nine with developmental delay or autism who have low to moderate support needs.
What matters isn’t only the scale of investment, but the logic. The task is less about generating knowledge than translating what we already know into reliable, scalable practice.
The effectiveness of Thriving Kids will depend not just on policy design, but on how the surrounding system behaves – how easily families can find the front door, how well services coordinate and whether capability is strengthened in the places children actually live and learn.
A question of equity
This is also an equity issue. Autism in girls is still under-recognised because presentations often diverge from diagnostic norms historically shaped around boys. Earlier, context-responsive supports create better chances to notice difficulties sooner and respond before distress compounds.
Timing isn’t an administrative detail; it’s the difference between prevention and crisis.
This is where Insel’s lesson connects directly to implementation.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguished between “fast” and “slow” thinking. Systems tend to default to fast thinking, to what is visible, measurable and defensible – eligibility criteria, therapy hours, service counts, compliance frameworks.
These tools are administratively legible. But they can crowd out what matters most, which is whether a child can participate, belong and thrive.
Slow thinking asks different questions. What is driving this child’s difficulties right now? What pressures are shaping development? What supports already exist around them, and what’s missing? What will protect this child not just this year, but over time?
Space for slower thinking
Thriving Kids creates the policy space for this slower, integrated thinking to occur earlier, before difficulties harden into patterns that are more costly, emotionally and economically, to shift.
It also enables proportionate response. Some children will need brief, targeted help. Others will need sustained involvement. A smaller group will still require the comprehensive protections of the NDIS.
Read more: A smarter NDIS: Reducing costs by keeping kids in class and parents at work
These transitions are not failures. They’re expected features of child development, provided pathways are clear and families aren’t forced to relive their story at each handover.
Equally important is where support happens.
Insel’s emphasis on people, place and purpose was grounded in lived reality. Resilience is built in ordinary environments, including homes, early-learning settings, schools and peer groups. The most effective early supports are rarely a carousel of clinic visits. They’re inclusive kinders, educators who feel confident, parents who feel supported, allied health expertise embedded where children spend their time and coordinated pathways families can navigate without friction.
Judges by outcomes that matter
This approach also reshapes how success is measured. Thriving Kids shouldn’t be judged narrowly by throughput or “diversion” from the NDIS. It should be judged by outcomes that matter – participation in early learning, reduced distress, stronger school engagement, increased parenting confidence and fewer crises over time.
The task now is implementation, and the conditions for success are well-understood – national consistency, genuine co-design, strong safeguards, workforce readiness and transparent implementation plans and reporting.
Australia doesn’t need to invent capability from scratch. Over the past decade, AllPlay has shown how research can be translated into practical inclusion supports at scale, equipping schools, sporting clubs and community organisations with tools that help children participate, not just receive services.
What matters now is building the broader system capacity to do this reliably, everywhere.
Responsive, personalised support
At its core, Thriving Kids is an attempt to integrate fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking ensures timely access, clear pathways and proportionate response. Slow thinking ensures formulation – the careful integration of biology with family context, learning environments, relationships and participation.
Together, they allow support to be both responsive and personalised, grounded in evidence, attentive to lived experience.
Insel’s challenge still stands. Families aren’t asking for less science, they’re asking for science that works, in the places children live and play, at the right time, in ways that build a life.
Australia now has both the evidence and the policy architecture to act earlier. Thriving Kids creates the conditions for that shift, but only if implementation is disciplined. Success won’t be measured in plans written or services delivered, but in children participating, families coping with greater confidence and fewer crises over time.
This article was co-authored with Jonathan Wenig, a partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler, an adviser to AllPlay, a director of Giant Steps Melbourne, and the founder of All Things Equal.
