ABOUT OUR CO-FOUNDERS
The Co - Founders
Mia Elmsäter (left)
Sylvie Hétu (right)
Mia Elmsäter is the mother of three adult sons. She resides in Järna, Sweden and DeLand, Florida. She studied sports in college in 1971 and has studied the Montessori method of education for day care children in 1984. She was the director of an alternative day care centre in northern Sweden. After the birth of her 3rd son, who had Downs Syndrome, she set up a parent support group for parents who have babies with special needs. She owns and has run an incorporated company “små liv ab” in Sweden since 1986 and held parent/baby classes in baby swim since 1987.
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Mia became an instructor with the International Association of Infant Massage (IAIM) in 1986, and since then, she has done volunteer work on the international level, helping the IAIM to build to the global association it is today. During this time, she taught parent classes and developed massage programmes for babies/children with special needs. In 1991 she organising and helped to set up the very first day care centre in Romania, which integrated children with special needs. The facility is still running today and self-sufficient. She became an international Trainer with IAIM in 1990. Mia also created several massage programmes and DVD’s, including “Tactile Stimulation” for children and adults with special needs, “Touch Therapy” which was used in nursing homes and long-term care facilities and a child massage programme used in Swedish day care centres.
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Together with her colleague, Sylvie Hétu, Mia has co-founded the Massage in Schools Programme in 2000 and co-authored the book Touch in Schools: A Revolutionary Strategy to Replace Bullying by Respect and to Reduce Violence which was published in 2010.
Sylvie Hétu is the mother of three grow-up children. She has a college diploma in nutrition from Montreal Maisonneuve College (1976) and a BSc degree in Education from Montréal University (1980) and is a qualified Steiner-teacher (master level) trained with l’Institut Rudolf Steiner au Québec (1998). She has taught primary school, as well biology and nutrition lessons to teenagers, and is an international lecturer on infant massage, parenting and education. Sylvie has been working with the International Association of Infant Massage since 1983 teaching parents of various background including multi-cultural groups and vulnerable families, and since 1989 as an international Trainer.
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Sylvie has co-founded the Massage in Schools Programme (2000) along with her Swedish colleague Mia Elmsäter. Sylvie has travelled the world bringing the IAIM and the MISP™ in nearly 30 countries on all continents. That answered her deep interest in human beings. It is her deep desire to support human beings in finding their place on earth. She studies, lectures and writes about education, attachment, noble authority, and spiritual aspects of our very humanity.
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Sylvie is the co-author of the Massage in Schools Manual for Instructors (2000), author of The Song of the Child (2004), co-author of Touch in Schools: a Revolutionary Strategy to Replace Bullying by Respect and to Reduce Violence (2010), has a published chapter (The Myth of Early Stimulation for Babies) in the book Too Much too Soon (2011), Facilitating IAIM classes (2012) in service of infant massage instructors, On meurt et puis après (2016) and co-authored Dans l’au-delà…la suite (2022) She is currently working on other books and continues to train and lecture worldwide. She is passionate about the idea of marrying ancient traditions with modern scientific and humanistic knowledge for improving humanity’s journey’s on earth.