Towards an integrated model for child and family services in central Australia.

This evidence indicates that we should not wait to intervene until a child is ready for school at around 5 years of age. By this stage, children have passed many developmental gateways for language acquisition, selfregulation and cognitive function, and their developmental trajectories are set. Of course, developmentally challenged children must be provided with appropriate services during their school years and later in life, but such interventions require increasing amounts of resources (Box 1) and produce diminishing returns as the child gets older.