KEY POINTS:
A teacher says parenting lectures should be compulsory in all secondary schools.
Tauranga Girls' College childcare and parenting teacher Jane Baker says lessons on parenting and basic life skills should be compulsory at "some stage" of every teenager's schooling.
Her comments are similar to those of Whakamarama-based child psychotherapist Augustina Driessen, who last week spoke about the need to establish a parenting centre in Tauranga.
Tauranga Girls' offers an optional six-month childcare and parenting class to Year 11 students and a year-long advanced childcare class to Year 12 and 13 students. They have done so for eight years.
Similar optional childcare classes for senior students are run at Otumoetai College, Mount Maunganui College, Katikati College and Bethlehem College.
Most students take the classes at Tauranga Girls' College as a step to becoming an early childhood teacher; others see it as a way to prepare themselves for parenthood.
However, the reality of parenthood did not always match the dream, Mrs Baker said.
"The kids are cute when they're little, then they get to 2 years old and they [the parents] are not happy."
As a result children as old as 2 were being put up for adoption, she said.
She said with the Kahui and Nia Glassie cases so close together, the Government and other agencies had to act on teaching would-be parents how to parent - and that had to start at a young age.
Increased funding for Plunket and more in-home visits would go some way in supporting both mother and child, she said.
In class, Mrs Baker, who has four children of her own, looks at basic parenting, including long-term relationships and what made a solid family.
The roles and responsibilities of families were taught, along with nutrition, health and safety, physical development and a special toddlers course run by Plunket's Shelley McKay, a mother of two.
Under the Plunket course mothers bring children into class, where the students learn about bathing, feeding, rest and play.
Mrs McKay said it was important she didn't "glamorise" motherhood to the girls.
Katikati College teacher Gaylia Bundle said compulsory parenting workshops were a good idea in theory but finding room in the curriculum would be hard.
Tauranga Boys' College does not run childcare classes but had its Good Man programme.
- Bay of Plenty Times
