06/02/2026
Iāve been thinking a lot about the Perth family this week.
The parents who died alongside their two autistic children.
I read that their NDIS funding had been reduced. That the children were like Mikey - but harder. No sleep at night (only during the day). Deemed too hard by most providers of services. And so the parents thought they had no other choice.
Every time something like this happens, people scramble to find a simple explanation.
Mental illness.
Evil.
Selfishness.
Monsters.
Because if we label it something extreme, we can put distance between ourselves and it.
But I donāt think these stories come from monsters.
I think they come from overwhelmed humans in a system that was never designed for what we now ask families to carry.
Humans evolved in small groups.
Villages.
Bands.
Extended families.
Many adults.
Many hands.
Many eyes.
Care was shared.
Children were surrounded by a web of people all day long.
No single adult was expected to be the primary carer for a high-needs child 18-24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for decades.
But that is exactly what modern special-needs parenting has become.
Letās talk numbers.
In ancestral human groups, caregiving was distributed across the day.
Multiple adults and older children were present.
No one person held continuous responsibility.
If you averaged it out, a biological parent may have provided something like:
2ā4 hours a day of direct hands-on care,
with the rest embedded inside shared group life.
Today?
Most special-needs parents provide:
16ā20+ hours a day of direct care, supervision, emotional regulation, safety monitoring, and behaviour support.
Thatās 110ā140 hours per week.
Often on top of:
ā¢ Managing therapy schedules
ā¢ Coordinating funding
ā¢ Advocating with schools
ā¢ Fighting for services
ā¢ Completing paperwork
ā¢ Planning for an uncertain future
All inside an isolated nuclear family.
Then we add policy.
We ration support.
We cut funding.
We reassess people who did not become less disabled.
We treat help as a privilege instead of an infrastructure necessity.
We get told to get help from our community instead of relying on the government for funding. But that community is working, a lot, to fund luxuries like food and a roof over their head.
And then we act shocked when families collapse under the weight.
I donāt look at families like the one in Perth and see villains.
I see people who were drowning.
I see carers living permanently at the edge of human capacity.
This isnāt about excusing harm.
Itās about recognising reality.
We are asking parents to perform a workload that no human nervous system evolved to sustain.
We werenāt meant to do this alone.
If there is anything to take from tragedies like this, I hope itās not outrage.
I hope itās urgency.
Urgency to fund properly.
Urgency to stop cutting essential supports.
Urgency to build systems that assume lifelong shared care.
Urgency to notice the quiet families.
Because love is powerful.
But love was never meant to operate without a village
