Hah! I knew it!!

According to this study, published in the British Medical Journal, parenting classes actually don't do a whole lot to improve the behavior of toddlers.

Researchers enrolled 300 mothers and their eight-month old babies in the Melbourne area into a parenting class.

Unlike earlier studies, this one studied families across the income spectrum instead of just focusing on poorer, higher-risk families. Harriet Hiscock and her team of researchers at the Centre for Community Child Health in Parkville, Australia, compared the test group with another set of mothers and kids who did not receive any special counseling over an 18 month period.

Mothers who received the training were somewhat less abusive and developed more realistic expectations of how quickly their children would progress, but there was no significant difference in the level of behavior problems in the children, or in the mental health of the mothers.

Whoo! There are all kids of gloom and doom stats about how behavior issues early in life can lead kids to become depressed, struggle in school and all sorts of other horrible things. When you've got a kid whose behavior can leave something to be desired, it's hard to walk the line between overcorrecting and saying "screw it." So it's good to know that spending many hours and lots of  cash on a parenting class wouldn't be that much more effective than anything else we might try. I'm half convinced toddlers are just plain feral anyway.