Two pieces before this one looked at what an organization loses when someone walks out, and at why the answer is not a better individual. Both of them were about the program. This one is about who absorbs the gap while the program figures it out.
It is the family. It is always the family.
When a therapist leaves, someone has to tell the next person that he will not start anything while his sleeves are wet. Someone has to say it again when the one after that arrives. Nobody assigns that job. It lands on whoever is still in the room, and the person still in the room is a parent.
Continuity is being asked of the person with the least capacity to give it, at the exact moment they have least of it. A parent who is coordinating appointments, holding down work, and managing a household is running near the edge of what anyone can run at. Ask them to also be the permanent memory of their child's support plan and you are asking for the one thing they cannot reliably give.
Anyone who has been the primary caregiver for a seriously ill family member knows the shape of this. The capacity you have left over for anything else is a small fraction of your usual, and it does not respond to being scheduled.
So there is a quiet unfairness in how this field distributes its failures. The organization loses a staff member, which is a business problem it has instruments for. The child loses continuity, which is a clinical problem someone will eventually notice. And in between, uncounted, the family absorbs the difference in evenings, in repeated explanations, in starting over.
Timing decides more of this than anyone admits. A family reaches the front of a waitlist at a moment they did not choose, and what they get depends on who happens to be available that month and how long that person stays. Two families with identical needs can have completely different years.
None of that is a reason for a parent to do more. It is a reason for a program to hold more.
The question worth asking a provider is not whether they have good people. It is what happens when a good person leaves. Who writes down what that person learned. Where it goes. Whether the next person will arrive already knowing what took the last one four months to learn, or whether the family will be asked, again, to be the one who remembers.
A parent should be the expert on their child. They should not also have to be the filing system.