All parents would benefit from parenting and prenatal classes. I think they are extremely important for parents who are minors, including mothers and fathers. I also think the the grandparents of minors with children should be required to attend classes. Babies having babies is becoming an epidemic. These new mothers and fathers need to learn about caring daily for an infant. They need to learn about responsibility, as well as strategies to get their baby through the first 18 years of their life. They need to learn about ways to prevent future pregnancies also.
Not only should they take a class, it should be required before they are even pregnant! Of course we don't want it to happen in first place, but if it does it is imperative they learn how to handle their new responsibilities. Children are a forever job. Teens having babies have got to learn that they are in it for the long haul. Babies are not dolls, or play things. Nothing glamorous about messy diapers and 3 am. feedings.
Although minors have the right to engage in sexual intercourse and have a child, I believe government, society, and family should take a more concerned approach to the children who did not ask to be put into this situation. Parenting classes would help the minors who likely have very little knowledge about raising children, and the children are more likely to grow up happy and healthy.
Minors as young as 12 can become pregnant and become parents. They are physically able to have children but are lacking in maturity and wisdom to handle raising a child. Classes that help teach parenting skills would be very helpful.
Minors who have had children while still legally children, themselves, have obviously not learned proper parenting from their own parents. This can be partially mitigated by teaching them proper parenting and supervision skills within the school. Another matter is that poverty is nearly guaranteed if you do not finish high school, have children out of wedlock, and never marry. Combining parenting skills with life skills courses targeted at teenagers having children should be mandatory to offset the lack of education they are receiving from their broken homes.
Since children are the future of our neighborhoods, cities, countries, and our world, it is important that they are raised well. When children have children, they need some guidance. And, while it is hopeful that their parents will give them some of that needed guidance, parenting classes would only help to better cement their ability to provide a good childhood for their children. When this is done, it promotes the best benefit to the parents, their children, and society in general.
If parenting classes were compulsory for anyone having children, then minors with children should be required to take them as well. But to insist for them to have parenting classes is simply too late. What they need more once they have children are classes to help them manage a household, because their children will be cared for in some way when they go to school, whereas their finances will never be looked after by someone else.
They aren't ready for them at that age. They should have to give their kid up for adoption, to their own parents or relatives if they so choose.