Yes

by Matthew J. Geiger

Created on: March 14, 2008   Last Updated: May 19, 2011

Parenting is a challenging learning process for both children and parents.  Unfortunately, babies do not come with instruction manuals, but luckily psychologists and other early childhood experts can offer support to new parents.  Because childhood development and the basic learning behaviors of all organisms are well studied and thoroughly understood subject areas, these professionals can give parents solid advice on how to care for their young children.   Given discipline is a major part of the child rearing process, parents should have as much exposure to proper disciplinary methods as possible.  One solution is to integrate discipline training into prenatal classes, thus offering parents the skills they will need to avoid improper discipline before problems arise.

Taking care of the health, nutritional, and other basic needs of a baby, or young child, is important.  Prenatal classes help ensure parents know and do what is best for baby before they must.  Beyond providing for a child's physical needs, however, the psychological and emotional needs of a human offspring requires a great deal more attention. Discipline is one aspect of parenting that tests a new parent’s limit.  Although the term discipline usually refers to a form of punishment applied to discourage unacceptable behavior by older children, newborns learn to behave in unhealthy ways, unless parents respond properly to their infant’s demands.  Parents can easily teach their babies to over rely on their presence and the unrelenting cries of a frightened baby can lead to stress, sleepless nights, and a myriad of problems for both parents and child. 

Meanwhile, prenatal classes may be the only time parents actually receive parental training, so it is a good time for them to refine the skills they will need within a year or so.  Although psychologists discourage the use of punishment and prefer parents only praise healthy behavior, all children like to test their boundaries and often find themselves engaging in potentially hazardous behavior that must be addressed with some form of punishment.   In such cases, parents are left to discipline their children.  Only through proper disciplinary measures will a child learn to behave properly and develop respect for their parents’ authority.  Alternately, improper discipline can lead to greater disciplinary problems as well as poor parenting that can leave a child scarred.

 Most new parents will either instinctively emulate their parents' disciplinary behavior or impulsively react to an unacceptable act by screaming, or spanking, their child.  As there are still many new parents who were screamed at and spanked as children, those who were will likely use these methods.  Spanking and screaming are forms of positive punishment as they add an aversive stimulus in response to an undesirable behavior.  Because these types of punishment lead to immediate results, parents tend to employ their use first, often more than they should, thus improper disciplinary measures can lead to child abuse while training children to respond to unpleasant situations with violence,  building resentment, and actually punishing children for revealing their misdeeds.  Outside of the high opportunity for the technique to be abused, spanking is often misused and creates other issues, thus it is inefficient.

Parents turn to positive punishments, because using these measures offers immediate results versus proper techniques that are applied without the aforementioned side effects, but the reality is that other methods simply take longer to fully affect a child’s demeanor.  Furthermore, parents often misuse more benign disciplinary measure and the result is a child who does not behave properly.  Parents themselves must respond to their child’s misbehavior in a proper, responsible fashion.  If the parents are out of control or unfair in how they discipline their child, their child will not be taught to behave properly, but rather, to behave as their parents do.  Moreover, better trained parents are more likely to discipline properly.  As such, including discipline training in prenatal classes would be quite beneficial as doing so would ensure parents have the tools they need to properly train their children throughout their childhood while prenatal classes may be the only opportunity to provide discipline training.

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