Safe T Sleep Speaker Profile

Speaker Profile
Miriam P. Rutherford-van Gisbergen
Mother/Educator/Inventor/Designer/Managing Director

A mother and positive parenting educator with nursing, counselling and tutoring experience, Miriam is an established advocate and counsellor of baby/child sleeptime safety and positive parenting skills who has worked with parents and health professionals for over twenty five years in both voluntary and paid capacities. 

Miriam believes parenting is a learned art and has worked to create more awareness of/and empower parents to make informed choices by listening to new advice, listening to old advice from trusted sources and to put that together with their own intuitive wisdom.  She believes that knowledge, commonsense, positive self esteem, practical skills courses, good support networks and safe resources will subsequently assist in the challenge of positive skilled parenting.

Miriam designed and developed the Safe T Sleep® Sleepwrap® to help prevent her own wriggly, baby from creeping and suffocating. At a later develop-mental stage to give herself a few extra moments to attend to her aspiring mountaineering 9month old, as she had nursed children who sustained severe and permanent brain damage from standing, climbing and falling from the cot/crib or bed. http://www.safetsleep.com/accidents/. She wanted peace of mind for herself by ensuring safe, settled and comfortable sleep for him. 

She believes Safe T Sleep (NZ) Ltd has helped set a precedent for education-based marketing as opposed to ‘emotive’ fear-based marketing. Safe T Sleep also helped set the standard for fabrics used for baby products to be more widely tested and products to be professionally and ‘independently’ tested.

Miriam has presented Medical Papers at National and International levels, practical sleeptime workshops and numerous positive parenting workshops including several on Marae. She has presented at National and International Conferences and Congresses including International SIDS, National and International Injury Prevention, International Karitane, National and International Royal College of Midwives, International Paediatric and Child Health Nurses, Early Childhood Conferences and Expo’s for Parent, Baby and Child.

She has worked alongside specialists from various facets within the medical profession, in both a learning and support role. 

To help prevent Plagiocephaly (PWS) (aka flat, deformed head). Medical Paper: http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/116-1181/581/ Miriam subsequently developed the little Safe T Sleep HEADwedge to be used together with the Sleepwrap. This helps ensure a nicely shaped head by assisting parents and caregivers to position baby's head on alternate sides.

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