The Safe T Sleep Story
This is my personal story of how I came to design the first Safe T™ Sleepwrap®.
As a young student nurse in New Zealand I often saw children being admitted to Accident and Emergency with broken wrists, arms, legs and head injuries from falling out of their cots and beds.
I can remember thinking how reactive it was that parents could allow their children to fall out of bed! I subsequently researched and found that in most ‘developed’ countries National and International statistics show nearly one in five 0-4 year olds admitted to hospital from falls are from cot and bed falls! I wasn’t going to let my child be one of those statistics!
Some time later I had my first child. At ten months of age Cameron decided that it was time to also develop and train for his future sports – mountain climbing and abseiling! I watched in amazement and horror how he instinctively used the ball of one foot to push against the cot slat and pull himself up with the other attempting to climb over the cot edge. Even though the cot setting was on low, if I had been a few minutes later he may have succeeded!
I needed to invent a safe sleeping device for my Cameron. A group of us started playing with various solutions and made our own prototypes. I kept mine extremely simple as I loathed the idea of a restraint.
The beauty of my Sleepwrap was its simplicity. A simple two piece safety wrap, one piece going around the mattress and a separate piece sewn on in a simple, special way to go around Cameron. This gave Cameron plenty of movement and yet allowed me a few extra minutes to attend to him on waking.
I can honestly say that at the time, the then unnamed Safe T Sleep™ Sleepwrap® was, next to breastfeeding, the second most helpful parenting aid for me. It was also an obvious source of comfort and security Cameron and it literally changed our lives, and we have all been much better off for it.
There is also researched and well documented evidence to show that children will respond well to the reassurance of ‘boundaries’. For century’s children of different cultures have been lovingly swaddled and wrapped in gauze and materials of different kinds.
For my subsequent children Anton Karl and Mieke I was able to use my invention from when they were quite little, placing the Sleepwrap over the top of their swaddling wrap so that when the time came that they wanted to have their arms and hands free I could simply use the Sleepwrap on its own to keep them safe and snug.
I taught all my three babies how to turn around within the Sleepwrap once they were out of the high SIDS risk period which then allowed them to sleep in their desired sleep position.
Basically theSleepwrap® also gave us a Royal Nights Sleep by helping us also follow the main International SIDS preventative guidelines.
Our Company’s Aim:
Since its conception in 1992 I have endeavoured to promote Safe T Sleep®, presenting medical papers at National and International level, practical sleeptime workshops and numerous positive parenting workshops on Marae’s and Early Childhood Centres to ensure all of Safe T Sleep® information is based on sound evidence based data.
It is our overall objective and mission to help parents and caregivers, in conjunction with positive, nurturing parenting skills to keep babies safer while sleeping and to give themselves peace of mind.
Miriam Rutherford-van Gisbergen
educator/designer/director
Download Fitting Instructions
Fitting Instructions are all in PDF format. 