More Tamariki Are Being Identified as Autistic. Our Systems Haven't Caught Up.

Ten years ago, plenty of autistic adults grew up without ever being assessed. Some are only being identified now, in their thirties and forties, often after watching their own child go through the process. That's not a small shift. It's a sign of how much our understanding has changed, and how far the systems supporting that understanding still have to catch up.

Why More Tamariki Are Being Identified

Autism is now understood to affect around 3% of New Zealanders, roughly 159,000 people, according to the NZ Health Survey. Internationally, the trend has been climbing for two decades: US surveillance data shows identified prevalence rising from about 1 in 150 children in 2000 to about 1 in 31 in the most recent report.

It's tempting to read that as an epidemic. It isn't one. Diagnostic criteria have broadened, clinicians are far better at recognising autism in girls, women and adults who mask well, and less stigma means more families come forward in the first place. More people are being seen. That's progress, not a crisis.

What We're Actually Seeing

The problem sits one step further along. Recognition has moved faster than the systems meant to support it. Families tell us the same things, over and over: long waits between a first referral and an actual assessment, learning support funding that's easier to be turned down for than approved for, and not enough trained psychologists, paediatricians and speech-language therapists to go around.

None of that is any one person's fault. It's what happens when demand for good, careful assessment grows faster than the workforce and funding built to meet it. The result is that families often end up doing the coordinating work themselves, chasing reports between school, health and specialist services that were never designed to talk to each other.

What Helps While the System Catches Up

Two things can be true at once. The system needs more capacity, clearer funding criteria, and services that are built around families instead of around each other's referral forms. And there is real, practical support available right now, before any formal diagnosis is in hand.

• Schools can put support in place based on what they're observing, without waiting for a diagnosis to arrive.

• Understanding a child's sensory needs, communication style and triggers can start immediately, and often matters more day to day than the label itself.

• Multidisciplinary support that looks at the whole picture, psychology, behaviour, communication and environment together, can start addressing what's actually happening at home and school while an assessment works its way through the queue.

If you're partway through a wait list right now, you haven't done anything wrong, and neither has your child. There's usually more that can happen in the meantime than people realise.

Get in touch if you want to talk through where to start.