Five Therapies, One Team

How it usually works: five clinics, five calendars

In most cases, each therapy is arranged separately.

Each place does its own evaluation, so the child goes through the same thing four or five times. Each place has its own paperwork, its own insurance authorization, and its own schedule, which almost never line up with each other. And each one is in a different part of the city.

The practical result, in Miami, is a mother driving between Kendall and Aventura with a three-year-old in the back seat who has already had two therapies that day.

A lot of families do not quit therapy because it is not working. They quit because the calendar is impossible.

What gets lost along the way

But the bigger problem is not logistics. It is that nobody is looking at the whole child.

The speech therapist works on words. The occupational therapist works on sensory regulation. The feeding therapist works on the table. Each does her part well, and none of them knows what the others are doing.

So things like this happen:

• Speech teaches him to request with a word, ABA teaches him to request with a picture, and at home nobody knows which one to use.
• The occupational therapist knows he dysregulates with noise, but the speech therapist sees him in the room facing the hallway.
• All of them send home exercises. Added together it is forty minutes a day, which no family can sustain.
• And the person who has to translate between all five, carrying information from one to the next, ends up being you.

That coordination work always exists. The only question is whether the clinic does it or the mother does.

A concrete example

This is a typical case rather than a specific patient: it describes a pattern we see often.

A four-year-old eats five things. All beige, all crunchy. Put something soft on his plate and he gags before touching it.

With separate therapies, the conversation is about food. Strategies at the table, gradual exposure, new foods next to safe ones. It moves slowly or not at all.

With the team together, the occupational therapist contributes something that changes the picture: this child avoids everything soft, not just soft food. Playdough, sand, finger paint, glue. It is not a food problem. It is how he processes that texture anywhere on his body.

And so the work starts in the hands, not the mouth. Weeks of playdough, of sand, of tolerating soft things far from the face. When that stops being frightening, the table becomes a much smaller problem.

Nobody arrives at that by reading a report three weeks late. Two therapists arrive at it talking in a hallway.

What “shared goals” means in practice

It is easy to say a team works together. Here is what would have to be true for it to be real:

One initial evaluation across all disciplines. The child tells it once.

One written plan they all share. Not five plans. One, with each discipline’s goals visible to the others.

The same words and the same cues in every room. If a picture is used to request in speech, the same picture is used in the ABA room.

The team meets. Genuinely, on a set schedule, to talk about the children several of them see.

One point of contact for the family. Someone you can ask, who can answer for the whole plan and not only their part.

Those five are good questions to ask any clinic that describes itself as multidisciplinary.

What this saves a family

One building and one parking lot. One set of paperwork. One day where two or three therapies can be stacked instead of spread across four afternoons.

And something less obvious that matters more than it sounds: not having to be the person carrying information from one professional to another. That load is tiring, and it is not yours.

Skills For Growth has ABA, speech, occupational, physical, and feeding therapy at the same address, with a team that knows each other. It is not a scheduling convenience. It is so the child is treated whole.