Teach Your Kids to Love Pets 5 - Pet Bed in Kids Room

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.

Teach Your Kids to Love Pets 4 - Take Them Along

Teach Your Kids to Love Pets # 4   Include Your Children When You Exercise Your Pet

People often take the dog with them when they take the kids to the park. That’s good! But how many take the kids with them when they walk the dog? Let kids see first hand how many people want to stop and pet your dog, talk to you about your dog, or admire your dog when you’re walking him. They will not only learn from you, but from other people. Talk to your pet. Talk to your children about your pet."I wonder what Rover is smelling as we walk along." Tell the kids facts about their pet as you walk along: "Did you know dogs can smell much better than we can?" Remark on who they talked to on their walk. “Wasn’t that nice when we met the lady with the black dog and she told us how beautiful Rover is and how well we’ve trained him? It made me really happy.” 

Teach Your Kids to Love Pets 1 - Show Them How

Teach Your Kids to love Pets - Show them How to Care for Pets

All kids seem to have a natural desire to love pets. As Charles Schulz said, who can resist “a warm puppy”? Puppies, kittens, bunnies, critters, and some birds are small, warm, soft and irresistible. Even ponies fall into this category on a different scale. They’re all cuddly, trusting and innocent, just like babies!

It’s our job as parents to teach children to learn “how” to love and care for pets. Although most pet experts say that the best age for a child to adopt a pet is around age 8, even the smallest child wants to hug and love a pet. It’s the greatest opportunity to teach children the meaning of being gentle. They have to be taught not to squeeze or hurt a pet. We need to give them the experience of hugging and cuddling a pet and make their first introductions to pets positive ones.  With constant supervision we can help small children live with pets, but we can’t expect them to take care of pets until they are school age. Further, we have to teach them how to take care of pets by modeling how to do it ourselves.

This blog is mostly about dogs, but we love all pets and you can adapt these thoughts to other pets. I’ve been overwhelmed in the last 20 years by how smart animals are. I remember the first time I saw one of the Purina teams, who travel around the country putting on shows with animals, demonstrate how to teach cats to walk across tightropes! It’s also amazing the things we can learn about our pets ourselves – and with the internet and television pet shows we have an abundance of resources for learning about our pets.