We were lucky to catch up with Claire McClintock recently and have shared our conversation below.

Claire, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Through thoughtful and meaningful human connection, our mission is to change the world by empowering every child’s caregivers to discover the potential of and promote the skills necessary for an optimal life of healthy and happy relationships within their community and beyond.

This mission has evolved over several years. We know that changing the world is a lofty goal, but why not?! We passionately believe that methods of prevention, specifically in the area of child development, can lead to profound changes. Beginning with treating a child as a whole and eventually as an important piece of a bigger whole, we strive to empower parents, caregivers, and educators to optimize development and therefore lead to stronger relationships.

Speech-language pathology is an inherently intervention-driven field. As my business partner Abby Brandi and I got to know each other while working at an elementary school in Colorado, we began having these discussions and expressing our frustration about this fact. There were so many kids whose communication barriers we felt could have been prevented. If only we had caught them earlier, if only we could have talked to their parents two years ago, if only we could reach more people … Our conversations eventually led to us starting Preventasaurus and to trying to navigate and intertwine the untapped world of prevention in our field with the present constraints of special education, health insurance coverage, and community access.

Our mission was initially much more simple: Prevention. Not intervention. It has evolved over time due to mine and Abby’s life experiences, our intentional focus on what we are doing with our company, and to our career experience. Preventing speech, language, and feeding disorders may seem very specific and irrelevant to most, but as we aim for a much broader mission, we strive to make that specific focus more obviously all-encompassing to human kind.

Claire, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a mother of five and a wife to my childhood sweetheart. With the overwhelming support of my family and the faculty at St. Xavier University in Chicago, I finished graduate school after having my second daughter and achieved my dream of becoming a speech-language pathologist in 2009. Since then, I have practiced in private outpatient clinics, autism centers, in Early Intervention (birth to 3 population), in the public school system, and as a consultant.

I have developed an authentic excitement for learning from the people around me-no matter their age or ability-and applying that knowledge to my daily life and career. I would not be who I am today without each and every experience I have had throughout my career. This includes meeting Abby Brandi, my partner in Preventasaurus. She and I share a passion for prevention but have also developed a meaningful friendship that has tied our families together. We are learning and growing together and our business has changed as we have grown. It’s not perfect-just like us. We are authentic and vulnerable in our presentation as we are with each other.

Our initial idea was to bring prevention courses to expectant parents. We were poised to do this at a nearby hospital before COVID hit. After having to shift to a virtual/hybrid platform in special education (in our day jobs), we realized how accessible we can make our prevention model to anyone. We are constantly evolving and changing. We are developing online courses that are geared towards parents and caregivers, but we also want to remain connected to our customers. We offer personalized consultations and this is our favorite way to apply our prevention model for families.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Ok, I admit I chose this question to answer as a way to stand on my soapbox for a minute. I am not on social media, personally. Abby and I have an Instagram account and we have started and stopped using it for marketing several times. The truth is, it stresses us out. We know what a powerful tool social media can be for businesses and we sometimes watch with envy as companies similar to ours attract thousands of customers from posting a few videos online. But what we always come back to is how we see social media contributing to feelings of anxiety and inadequacy in parents that we serve but also in us.

Some of those first conversations Abby and I had before we started Preventasaurus were about screen time and how we felt it contributed to some of the learning problems we were seeing with our students. This led to more conversations about social media and how it had affected our lives. When we decided to start our business, I caved and created an Instagram account. I followed parenting experts, mom-influencers, developmental pediatricians, feeding therapists, lactation consultants, educators, etc. who were in the business of child development and parent coaching, just like me. Although some of the things I saw were eye-opening and helpful, I ended up with an overarching feeling of anxiety and worthlessness-like I was constantly being told that I was doing enough or that I did not know enough. Just the sheer amount of available information was overwhelming. Abby and I did not want our families to feel that way.

One of the reasons we decided to start Preventasaurus was so that we could help parents feel more confident in themselves, but also to sift through and prioritize all of the information that is out there for them. We struggle with using social media to build our business. We know it is very useful and could help us succeed, but we want to connect with our local communities first. Our journey to using social media is a process and we are taking a very human and personal approach to that process.

Have you ever had to pivot?

So many examples of this one! I sometimes joke that I have lived 9 lives. I have gone through so many changes in my life, but the decisions I have made have always centered on my family and what is best for them.

The best example of this is probably my decision to leave the school I worked at for 5.5 years. During the pandemic, two of my kids were at the school with me. My two oldest were in middle school and my youngest was still in daycare. I was being pulled in a million different directions and my job had changed drastically. The kids I worked with needed me then more than ever and my physical job became more about sanitizing hands and less about speech goals. We were also oscillating between being in school in person and using online learning. It was hard to juggle.

Like so many other parents, my husband and I struggled with decisions like whether to keep our kids in the public school system. I never in a million years thought I would utter the words, “maybe we should home school,” but this came up many times in 2020-2021 especially. Everything was so unclear and any choice we made did not have anything close to guaranteed results.

At one point, on a particularly tough day-I can’t even remember what we were arguing about-but I said to my daughter, “Things are really tough for parents right now.” I will never forget the look on her face as she responded, “Yeah well, things are really hard for kids right now too.” I knew right then that we needed a change. We needed to prioritize our kid’s well being and we needed to be there for them. I left my job at the school, which was the hardest decision I’ve ever made. I felt like I was abandoning those students and their families during a time when they needed me most. But, my new job allowed me to prioritize my own family and to be there for them anytime they needed me.

Contact Info:

• Website: preventasaurus.com