National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 2010
A diary of a child psychologist
I had a meeting yesterday with a board-certified behaviour analyst. We are supporting the same child. He is 12-years old. Let’s call him Max. Max was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at a very young age. Max’s parents gave me consent to write about him and include some pictures.
Max comes to see me every second Saturday. He has barely missed one session over the three years that I have been supported him. I remember our first few sessions clearly because he was drawing very disproportional face and often mapped their emotions to it. He was always eager to “do some work” and to follow schedules in our sessions. The NDIS skill building approach heavily focused on this, or else, the child will not have access to funding support for psychology.
But for Max it really doesn’t matter what we do in our session. He values our connection and the safe space that is provided to him. This safe space is a truly special because his world is socially restricted because of his disability.
Max goes to a mainstream school and is currently in Year 6. He has special supports at school and most of his teachers are amazing. Max, however, can’t go every day. He knows it, and everyone else knows it. While mainstream schools can be a fantastic place to build relationships, learn and engage, children with autism are fatigued from the noise, busy classrooms, overworked teachers and the fluorescent light. Max feels it too. Every new school term is a new transition and he “just can’t”. We heard a lot about “school can’t” over the recent years and Max has just that, even if he doesn’t have the words for it now.
Max is a truly special boy, not because he is autistic, but because despite his challenges, he keeps building resilience and competency in a world that wasn’t made for him.
We are playing together. Max is eager for his father to leave to that he can “start”. He goes into the playroom and picks up the dolls and says “look, the babies”. He hands me one and he keeps the other. This has been the consistent play Max has done for the past 15 sessions, without failure. Max wants the dolls to watch how Max and I are playing. “Are you watching baby?”, he asks while filling the school bus with more dolls. They are going on a long and dangerous trip, and people are falling off the bus. The journey causes great fatigue, as he slowly and forcefully moves it across from our playroom to the open space in the clinic. “They arrived!”.
The babies, the school bus and the long journey, have been of great interest for formulation around Max’s functional difficulty to throw away old shoes and put on new shoes. It has been a pressing point for the family and therapists over 2-years. Max is scared, embarrassed, angry and sad about having new shoes on. The collaborative work with the behavioural analyst and the family has finally resulted in some tangible progress. It is a true success story of how teams work collaboratively to provide the environment an autistic child, like Max, need to thrive.
So, we meet regularly. The behavioural analyst sees Max twice a week, and she has the type of creativity and determination it takes to support a child with a disability long-term. We are a strong team, and we got Max at every step of the way.
But while our meeting yesterday should have just been about the amazing progress that Max has been wearing his shoes to school for the past week, the first question we addressed was a rather anxious one. What will happen to Max and all the other children who we are supporting every day? How will the kids be supported in mainstream programs when they already struggle in this environment?
As sole traders in private practice settings we are not only worried that the models that are being discussed excludes our professional expertise but proactively trying to silence it by making our support seem insignificant.