Ateah - prenatal survey and intervention

I did a small survey of parents of young children and I found that the most common things that they wanted to learn about was expected child development as well as discipline; what was, you know, appropriate discipline for children. There were other things they wanted to know too like nutrition and immunization, those sorts of things. But they were really interested in, you know, expected child development and what you would expect children to do at certain ages. And to me that’s really related to discipline because a lot of the disciplinary responses that parents give are because they are expecting a child probably to know and do a lot more advanced things than they’re actually capable of.

So I developed a prenatal education intervention and it was just a pilot program really, so it was just about an hour long. And I gave this to 32 first time parents; they were all first time parents at two different sessions. So there were 15 in one and 16 in another and the results were very, very encouraging.  In the intervention I talked about expected child development up to just the ages of one and a half because you don’t want to give parents too much information too soon. I really wanted to focus on the newborn and, as I say, within the first year and a half. I also talked about safe sleep environments; why it’s important for infants to sleep on their back.  I think a lot of parents are aware of that information now. But also the issue about not sharing a sleep surface with your child because of the concern of, you know, we used to call it rollover death but now it’s the concern of really possibly suffocating your child, you know, when you ‘re not aware of it because you’re in a state of deep sleep as new parents often are.

The other things I was including in this information session was physical punishment and how really, we feel now developmental psychologists and healthcare practitioners feel that there’s no need for physical punishment for any age of child particularly very young children who are unable to understand consequences who are only responding in a way to have their needs met. So to punish children just to our minds doesn’t make any sense. We talk about really the role of nurturing not punishing and promoting healthy development.

So those are some of the things I talked about in the education intervention and the parents responded by saying that even though they’d heard a lot of these things maybe in passing, they hadn’t really thought about how it would apply to their own child or hadn’t necessarily even were thinking of incorporating it. And almost all of the parents said that they thought this information should be available to all expectant parents and that they intended to use the information with their own children. So it was very encouraging.