We are pulling our autistic child from Breaking Barriers despite loving his techs and BCBA…read more
Repeated scheduling failures, "clerical errors," and rigid fee enforcement directly harmed our child and were consistently minimized by leadership.
Parents of neurodivergent kids should read this before enrolling.
We are leaving Breaking Barriers Therapy Services despite genuinely positive clinical relationships. That alone should tell you how terrible our experience with the company has been.
Let me be absolutely clear: the clinicians were wonderful. The company itself is reckless, incompetent, and emotionally unsafe for neurodivergent children.
Over the past year, we experienced constant scheduling failures, last-minute provider cancellations, and shockingly poor, cold communication. On multiple occasions, we arrived for scheduled sessions with our neurodivergent child and waited up to 20 minutes, only to be told that "communication fell through the cracks" and no technician was available. I had to drag my screaming, kicking child, who didn't understand why he couldn't go play with his friends, back to the car with two other children in tow.
These are not minor inconveniences. For a child with ASD, PDA, and anxiety, unpredictability and disrupted transitions cause real distress. Breaking Barriers treats these disruptions as clerical problems. In reality, they were preventable clinical harm that leadership repeatedly minimized.
One incident alone should disqualify this place from working with vulnerable kids. During a 12-4 session, we were texted at 3:15 asking if we were coming to pick our child up. When we said no, because the session ended at 4:00, we were told a "clerical error" had occurred.
What was not disclosed at first was that staff had already packed up our child, taken him downstairs to wait for us for 15 minutes, then reversed course and told him to go back upstairs and resume therapy. That unnecessary transition reversal sent him into a full dysregulated fit. Any competent ABA provider understands how destabilizing false transitions are for autistic children. The fact that this happened, and was later dismissed as a clerical issue, speaks volumes.
And then there is the billing.
When our child was sick and we followed illness guidance, we were charged a no-show fee that leadership later reframed as a "waiver" rather than acknowledging error. When the company canceled a session last minute due to staff illness, we were charged a $50 cancellation fee for overlapping OT services we reasonably assumed were canceled as well. The only alternative offered was impossible to attend due to work and childcare constraints created by their own cancellation.
When we contested the fee, leadership insisted ABA and OT are separate divisions. When we asked who we should contact to cancel OT in the future, we were given the same phone number we had been texting all along, directly contradicting their own explanation.
We escalated calmly. We documented everything. We acted in good faith.
Based on our direct interactions with Josh and Jenn Taylor, executive leadership consistently prioritized policy defense and liability mitigation over the emotional safety of our child and the lived impact on our family. That is our honest conclusion after exhausting every internal avenue.
If you are a parent of a neurodivergent child who needs predictability, transparency, and basic human judgment, understand this clearly: this organization will make your life harder, not easier. Your child's nervous system will be treated as collateral damage of "clerical errors" and rigid policy enforcement.
We are leaving not because of the therapists, but in spite of them. We strongly urge other families to think very carefully before trusting this organization with their child.
