When your child has multiple therapists, coordination doesn't happen automatically—you are the care coordinator. Here is a practical system for keeping everyone aligned without losing your mind.
It starts innocently enough. Your child gets an occupational therapist (OT). Then a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Then a behavioral therapist for the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) piece. Each provider is doing good work in their individual sessions—but you have started to notice that what one therapist is working on seems to contradict the approach another is using. The OT is teaching your child to ask for a break when they are overwhelmed. The teacher does not know this strategy exists. The SLP is working on requesting, but using different vocabulary than the OT. Nobody is wrong, exactly. But nobody is coordinated, either.
This is one of the most common—and least-discussed—challenges of ongoing autism and ADHD care. Securing the team was hard enough. Now the harder, quieter work begins: making the team actually function as one.
The absence of coordination between your child's providers is not negligence—it is the default state of a fragmented system. Each provider operates within their own practice, their own documentation system, their own scope of care. Unless someone actively creates the conditions for communication, it will not happen on its own.
That someone is almost always you. As the parent, you are the only person who has visibility across every provider, every session, and every setting your child moves through. You are, functionally, the care coordinator—whether or not anyone has named you that. The question is whether you have the tools and the system to do it well.
You do not need elaborate shared portals or weekly team calls to create meaningful coordination. The most effective system most families use is simple: a one-page summary of your child's current goals across all providers, updated every few months, that you share with each member of the team.
This document does not need to be polished. It needs to list each provider, their current focus, the specific strategies or language they are using, and any goals that overlap across disciplines. When your OT and SLP are both working on communication—which is common—seeing each other's framing in writing opens the door to alignment that would never happen through separate session notes.
Share it at the start of each new therapy relationship and at each review point. Email it to the school at the beginning of the year. The act of creating it forces you to see the full picture; the act of sharing it invites providers to see each other.
For children with complex or overlapping needs, a periodic joint call between two or more providers can be worth the effort of arranging. Most therapists will do a brief coordination call at no charge, or fold it into their existing documentation time, if you ask directly. Frame it specifically: "I'd like to get you and the OT on a fifteen-minute call to align on communication strategies. Would that work?"
You do not need everyone on the same call at once. Two providers coordinating is more than most families achieve, and it compounds. An OT and SLP who have spoken once will communicate more naturally going forward than two who have never made contact.
At minimum, every provider on your child's team should know who else is on the team and what they are working on. This sounds obvious but often does not happen because intake paperwork asks for medical history, not current therapy roster.
Make it a habit to tell each new provider at intake: here is who else we are working with, here is what they are focusing on, and here is what I have noticed about how those pieces interact. Providers who know the full picture make better decisions within their scope. A behavioral therapist who knows your child is working on sensory regulation with an OT will approach a meltdown differently than one who does not.
Coordinating a care team generates its own communication overhead—session summaries to read, questions to relay, updates to track. Without a system, important information lives in scattered emails, text threads, and mental notes that fade.
Keep a running log for each provider: date of session, what was covered, anything you want to follow up on or share with another provider. It does not need to be detailed. Three sentences per session, consistently maintained, gives you a record that makes coordination conversations faster and follow-through easier to track.
If your child's care involves applied behavior analysis (ABA) with a behavior technician and a supervising board-certified behavior analyst (BCBA), keep notes on both—what the technician does in session and what the BCBA communicates at check-ins are often different, and both matter.
The What's Next Health care team management tools are built for exactly this: logging provider interactions, tracking goals across the team, and keeping your coordination notes in one place rather than scattered across your inbox. If you want the broader framework for building and managing a care team from the ground up, Your Child's Care Team is the complete guide. And if you are still adding providers to the team, Finding Therapists for Your Child covers the search from start to finish.
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