Teach Your Kids to
Love Pets # 5 Put the Pet Bed in Your Child’s Room
One of my friends has 5 children (a blended family) and
luckily each child can have his/her own room – and their own dog! That’s a
houseful! The family committed to that for many reasons. One was that old
reliable “teaching the kids responsibility”. (Do we really think dogs were
created to teach children responsibility?) But they went about the process
right.
When the child was about 8 years old, each child could chose and name his
or her own dog. After they had been taught about pet care, the parents had
modeled good pet care for a couple years, and they asked to take over the daily
feeding and exercising of the dog, the reward was getting to have the dog sleep in
their room. By then the kids were about 9 or 10. (It’s important to know when your
child is ready and not insist on your time table.)
Another reason they let the
dogs sleep in the bedroom (but not in the child’s bed) was they knew the dog
would alert the household and protect the child if someone tried to break in.
You might think that’s very unlikely to happen, but if you think of the famous home
kidnappings in the last couple of decades, none of them had a dog in the house.
Nothing deters people like a barking dog or wakes you up better in the middle of the night.
The children in this family were also lucky that the younger ones had older siblings who loved and cared for
pets and were good examples of how to treat their dogs. If we want our children to grow up loving pets, we can do what this family did no matter what the pet species or how many or few children we have.
