Ellen Carlin became interested in helping children with hearing conditions when she met her neighbor's cousin who suffered from hearing loss. Ellen was 15 years old at the time and became increasingly fascinated with how the child learned to understand others and be understood, despite being deaf. "I was really interested in how he learned to communicate," she said. Ellen's desire to work with children with communication disorders led her to earn a master's in speech pathology from Miami University of Ohio in 1994. After college, Ellen began to pursue her professional goal of helping children with speech disorders. "This is what I wanted to do—work with children with all kinds of communication disorders," she said. "I've been doing this for 26 years." Ellen works in the field of pediatric speech language development with children who have oral motor difficulty that affects their communication skills. Ellen said that first she identifies indicators to determine where the speech difficulties might have originated. For example, Ellen said breastfeeding problems early on can lead to future speech issues. As a result, her practice also works with mothers and nursing babies to help them get back to breastfeeding to strengthen their oral motor skills. "Eight times out of 10, babies have had feeding difficulties starting somewhere along the line," she said. Ellen said people are drawn to Carlin Speech because of the feeding programs the practice offers. The infant programs, such as the oral motor treatment for nursing newborns, help babies build muscle strength and coordination for learning speech skills. The practice offers a one hour social-language group for older children, too. Ellen said engaging parents is key to a child's speech success. "We save the last five minutes of the session, and we talk to the parent about how the child did, what they can do to work on in the therapy," she said. "We encourage parents to come in and be a part of it." The practice has 20 employees, 15 of whom are therapists. Ellen's husband, Mike Carlin, is the business manager. He said therapists come from a variety of skillsets, and they interview 25-30 people for each therapist they hire. "We look at and spend a lot of time on what we feel is the perfect therapist," Mike said. "The No. 1 thing [we look for] is you have to be passionate about pediatrics. We really take a collaborative approach to the process. We really want to have the best group of therapists."