Letting a service provider go

[Anonymous]

Thought I would post in case it helps anyone. One of the many lessons I have learned is that it is OK to let a service provider go/politely move on/fire her/him. Sometimes you see it's not a match after a few sessions. Sometimes it's great for a year or even a few years, but they lose steam, start late, end early, don't have as many creative ideas, etc. It used to pain me so much to think of moving on/ending services with a provider we had seen for a while, but now I see it as simply business. When things are working, I express gratitude often. When they aren't, I give it a little time, then I calmly share my concerns and see if we can come up with a plan. Sometimes that isn't enough. I have wasted so much time, energy and MONEY by not cutting the cord sooner. EVERY time we moved on, whether after a few sessions, or a few years, it was for the best.

Most recently we stopped with a ST about 3 months ago. We had worked with her for 4 years. We saw such great progress the first year or 2 and after that I just kept telling myself she is good, when for us she wasn't helping much anymore. I shared some concerns and really nothing changed. She clearly was losing steam and just didn't have the same passion and dedication. I gave her plenty of outs and she kept insisting things would change. Finally, I said we were going to try a new approach and provider. We started with someone new a week later and the progress we have seen since is more than we saw with that ST the last year and a half. Change can be good and it's not personal, it's business.

[Anonymous]

Op, I agree. Good that you switched.
It is for our own kids good, no personal. If we delay or hesitant to make the switch, we are loosing not only money but kids prime age to develop.

[Anonymous]

Definitely! It's just business, nothing to feel bad about. Sometimes the kid/therapist max out on each other even if the therapist is really skilled.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes the therapists act unprofessional and full of crap and not able to accomplish what they are supposed to do. They keep taking your money and trying to bs their way through it but bullshiiiiit only goes so far before it is obvious there is no improvement.

[Anonymous]

I totally agree. There are so many providers out there that are perfectly happy to keep taking your money, and I'm afraid before we got more savvy in the realm of speech therapy, we took the bait that "it might take months to see improvement." So much of it is about the relationship though (mostly with the child, but parents too), and honestly, I often saw things that told me I should have cut the ties right away, but kept on going for fear that I was being too picky when DC really needed the help.

Just to add my own caveat, beware too of providers who try to diagnose your child with something when they are not qualified to do so. When one of our children was small, not quite 3 years old, we switched to a new speech therapist after our old one left the state. She was all over the place as a therapist, seemed very disorganized and just could not seem to engage my kid. I persevered even though my gut said no and then she began trying to hard sell me about getting our kid evaluated for autism. We were so blindsided with shock and worry (though not being concerned about autism ourselves) that we didn't start connecting the dots when she just happened to have a very close colleague, a BCBA, who had worked with autistic kids for decades and ran an ABA therapy clinic. Pretty sure she was working for this clinic on the side and funneling clients into ABA whenever possible. After lots of expensive testing later, our kid was not on the spectrum, but had anxiety and mild attention deficits.

There are so many awesome providers out there – but there are enough who will prey on your fear of "don't you want to do the best for your child?" that you may go down the wrong paths and ignore your instincts. Always remember you know your child better than anybody.