Are the kids alright?

In 1966, The Who released the rock anthem “The Kids Are Alright”. Written by guitarist Pete Townsend, its message offered rebellious reassurance to older generations: young people were doing fine and were independent, capable and resilient, despite adult anxieties and changing times. In post-war Britain, many young people were confident that their lives would be better than their parents’. 

New Zealand’s growing number of young people outside employment, education and training is not simply a welfare or mental-health problem. It reflects a fragmented system that responds only after young people have become disengaged, and then offers them either sanctions or diagnosis. A more effective response would intervene earlier and connect education, employment, social support and mental-health assistance around their practical needs. 

New Zealand has now edged ahead of the UK in the proportion of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET): 13.8% compared with 13% respectively. The worst of the regional figures show an even wider gap, with a reported rate of 42.8% in Ōpōtiki, compared with 21% in Blackpool. 

These comparisons are necessarily crude, but the stories behind the figures are alarming. More troubling still is the apparent lack of urgency in New Zealand to acknowledge and address the problem. 

The UK is nowhere near fixing these problems, but a sense of urgency is finally emerging. The Times recently published an editorial titled “Britain cannot afford to lose another generation”. It warned that Britain faces significant financial and human costs as more young people become stuck on benefits, and noted that young people are now less likely to find work than people aged over 55. Alan Milburn, a former minister who has completed a damning review of young people not in employment, education or training, described the welfare system as a total state failure and morally indefensible. Rather than serving as a safety net, he argued, it has become an “elephant trap” that ruins young lives. 

By comparison, the New Zealand Government still appears content to spend more than 13 times as much on passive cash benefits as it spends on active employment services. Recent OECD research indicates that New Zealand devotes approximately 0.20% to 0.25% of GDP to Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs), placing it in the bottom half of the OECD’s 38 member countries. These figires suggest that the New Zealand system undervalues – and certainly under-resources – efforts to prevent or even reverse delays or pauses in people’s vocational paths. 

The National Government has announced plans to introduce random drug testing for beneficiaries, at an initial cost of $1.5 million, to ensure they are “ready for work”. The Prime Minister said additional treatment services could be funded if the initiative creates further demand. That assurance overlooks an existing problem: Te Hiringa Mahara, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, has already reported that drug treatment services in New Zealand are not meeting current demand.  

Under welfare-law changes introduced in October, 18- and 19-year-olds will lose access to Jobseeker Support or the Emergency Benefit if their parents earn more than $67,225 per annum. 

ACT leader David Seymour has questioned the surge in Jobseeker Support claims associated with poor mental health. The ACT Party’s proposed response is a welfare-reform package intended to reduce health and disability benefit spending by more than $650 million over four years. This frames rising distress principally as a fiscal problem, rather than asking what conditions are driving young people out of education and employment. 

It seems both irresponsible and self-serving that here in New Zealand, the state’s principal responses to disengaged young people are either to impose benefit sanctions, with the implicit assumption that they are malingering or insufficiently resilient, or to require them to become patients whose circumstances are medicalised and treated. The second option brings a further obstacle: gaining access to a mental-health system that often struggles to respond until a diagnosis has been attached to the person. 

For a long time, I have been concerned that people experiencing psychological distress and trauma are expected to repackage their experiences to fit the worldview through which mental-health services commonly interpret them. That concern is neither new nor mine alone. 

In 2018 the report of a Ministerial Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction (He Ara Oranga) presented two core conclusions:

1. “New Zealand’s mental health and addiction problems cannot be fixed by government alone, nor by the health system.”

2.     “We can’t medicate or treat our way out of the epidemic of mental distress and addiction” 

Eight years later, policy still relies heavily on the two approaches the inquiry found insufficient: clinical treatment and government action delivered through established systems. Increasingly, responsibility is also shifted onto the people those systems fail to support. Where a diagnosis is obtainable, it can become less a gateway to help than a label that defines a person by difficulty rather than strength and potential, restricting opportunities in education, employment and relationships. 

In 2026, mental-health challenges are often rooted in life circumstances: poverty, homelessness, unemployment, violence, fragile relationships, lack of sleep or exercise, abuse, racism, the continuing effects of colonialism and, above all, an absence of hope. Even to a layperson, these conditions appear to demand social, economic and relational responses very different from those currently offered. 

In 2026, our continuing preference is to interpret, understand and pathologise expressions of human and social messiness predominantly as medical issues. In doing so, we risk writing off a whole generation and accepting the compounding consequences that will follow.We do have options are more constructive alternatives are beginning to emerge: support organised around need rather than sanctions or diagnosis. 

In October, the UK Department of Health and Social Care published a review of mental health conditions, ADHD and autism[1]. At more than 500 pages, it is comprehensive and poses several significant challenges for government, including the following: 

The government must address two failures at the same time:

1. People wait far too long for support, diagnosis and treatment.
2. Diagnosis has become the primary gateway to support; that support could and should be available earlier. 

In response, services should adopt a “needs-led, plus diagnosis” approach, based on four distinctions:

• Population prevalence [of a disorder] is not the same as administrative prevalence [of a disorder][2]
• Distress is not disorder
• Diagnosis is not need
• Support is broader than treatment

 In the Netherlands, they have responded to young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) through an integrated system aimed at preventing disengagement, rather than relying principally on benefit sanctions or medical diagnosis. 

Its approach has several important features:

• Early prevention. Young people must remain in education until age 18 or until they obtain a basic qualification. Schools and municipalities actively monitor early school-leaving and intervene before a young person becomes detached from education and work. 
• Strong vocational pathways. Vocational education is closely connected to employers, apprenticeships and workplace experience. Around 69% of Dutch upper-secondary students are enrolled in vocational programmes, and many acquire substantial work experience while studying. 
• Regional coordination. The country is divided into 35 labour-market regions, bringing together municipalities, schools, employment services, vocational-training bodies, employers and trade unions. This allows national policy to be adapted to local labour-market conditions. 
• Individualised, practical support. Assistance can include career guidance, job-search help, training, apprenticeships, workplace learning and help with debt. Support is therefore broader than either welfare administration or clinical treatment. 
• Employer involvement. Employers help shape vocational courses and active labour-market programmes, while wage subsidies and other incentives encourage them to recruit young people who may otherwise struggle to enter employment. 
• A Youth Guarantee. The Dutch implementation of the European Youth Guarantee seeks to ensure that young people receive an offer of employment, education, apprenticeship or work experience within four months of leaving education or becoming unemployed. 
• Locally integrated social support. Municipalities have responsibility for youth care, participation and labour-market support, including services addressing mental health and other barriers to engagement. 

 The results are striking.

 The Dutch NEET rate for 15–24-year-olds was reported at 3.6% in 2024, while the latest OECD profile reports 6.1% of 18–24-year-olds as NEET in 2025, against an OECD average of 14.1%. (These figures use different age groups, so they should not be treated as directly interchangeable.)

The critical lesson for New Zealand is not that the Netherlands has discovered a single successful programme. Rather, it has built a coherent system connecting education, vocational training, employers, communities, regions and social support. Young people are not required first to fail, become long-term beneficiaries or acquire a diagnosis before practical help becomes available. 

The Chair of the UK review into mental health, ADHD and Autism, Professor Peter Fonagy, included a personal letter to young people in his foreword. Its language captures the humane premise missing from punitive and diagnosis-led responses. I have included a few lines below; it provides a fitting conclusion:

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-into-mental-health-conditions-adhd-and-autism-final-report

[2] Population prevalence measures how many people actually have a condition in a given population (whether diagnosed or not), whereas administrative prevalence counts only the individuals who have been formally diagnosed, recorded, and captured by public or health service systems