The Co-Founders
Mia Elmsäter (left) - Sylvie Hetu (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.
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.
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.
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Sylvie Hétu is a mother of three adult children, all of whom attended the Rudolf Steiner School in Montreal. Her studies include Nutrition (Maisonneuve College), Education (University of Montreal), Waldorf Pedagogy (Rudolf Steiner Institute in Quebec), and numerous complementary training courses. She is an international trainer and speaker specializing in education.
Sylvie has been involved with the International Association of Infant Massage since 1983, teaching parents and training professionals from various backgrounds. She is the co-founder, along with her colleague Mia Elmsäter from Sweden, of the peer massage approach in schools. Her work has taken her to several countries on five continents, including humanitarian projects with children with special needs in very vulnerable environments, particularly in Asia and Africa.
She is the author of "The Song of the Child" (2004), soon to be translated into French, co-author of "Touch in Schools: a Revolutionary Strategy to Replace Bullying by Respect and to Reduce Violence" (2010), and author of "On Meurt, et Puis Après ?" (2016). Sylvie contributed a chapter ("The Myth of Early Stimulation for Babies") to the book "Too Much too Soon" (2011), and is a co-author of the notebooks "Dans l’au-delà, la suite..." (2021), translated into English, and "Le Sommeil, ce Mystère" (2023), published by Ur Publications & Programmes, a publishing house she co-founded.
The golden thread running through her various contributions is her enthusiasm for human development. Her inexhaustible source of inspiration over the past forty years, in all areas of her personal and professional life, is the science of the spirit, or anthroposophy, shared with the world by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).