Let’s Talk About How This All Started…

If you are new, my name is Carson Melatti and I am the speech therapist behind it all here!

So why did I start Teach Em To Talk? Let’s go back…

I graduated from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business in 2015. I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do in life and getting a business degree felt like a safe bet at the time. I happened upon the world of brand management and worked for a large consumer packaged goods company for three years. At that point, I really started to feel like there had to be something more to life. In short, I felt unfulfilled working on Excel in a cubicle for 40+ hours per week. I started to read articles and engage in self reflection and two theme questions kept popping up in my research about how someone figures out what they want to do in life:

1) what am I good at?

2) when do I feel happy?

The answer to those two questions for me was practicing compassion! Combining that with something that you could get paid for put me into the therapy space.

Next, I had to figure out what type of therapist I wanted to be! I have been interested in language as a subject matter; I was a Spanish minor in college and always was particularly drawn to language acquisition. This naturally led me to the field of speech-language pathology!

After taking a year to gain experience in the speech therapy world world through volunteering, I was accepted to graduate school at Eastern Michigan University. I loved my entire experience and really soaked up the information I learned in my classes because I am so naturally interested in the topic! I graduated with a Master’s in Communication Sciences & Disorders.

After working in a pediatric clinic for two years treating a wide variety of disorders, including articulation, fluency, autism, dyslexia, and others, I found myself with an opportunity to specialize in the exact topic that interested me the most- language acquisition! I then began working in early intervention with the birth to three year age group as part of Michigan’s Early On program where I worked primarily with late talking children in the birth to three age group.

This experience really showed me how much of a need there is to support parents of children who aren’t acquiring language in the typical way!

With a goal to help as many families as possible and to create a solution to overcome some of the barriers that families may experience to receiving services (financial, logistical, emotional, etc.), I decided distributing my knowledge online would be the most effective way to achieve my goal and Teach Em To Talk was born! When I am working with families one-on-one in the traditional speech therapy model, my time is the most limiting factor. By creating an online course, I am now able to educate parents on a much greater scale.

This also empowers parents to be the ones to teach their children how to talk, which is so much more effective! One or two thirty minute speech therapy sessions with a stranger cannot compete with the deep parent-child bond and the significantly greater time parents spend with their children. Doesn’t it just make sense to give parents the strategies to teach their children how to talk? Let’s get those babes talking sooner!

So that is why I am here! I love to share my passion and knowledge about language acquisition with parents in the hopes to give children the communication skills to be able to advocate for themselves as fast as possible.

Because isn’t life a little more fun when we can talk to each other?! I certainly think so!