Raising a Puppy: A refresher course in Basic Parenting 101

January 09, 2012

Julie A. Riess, Ph.D., is the Senior Advisor on Child Development and Education at Families and Work Institute. She is a developmental psychologist and the director of the Wimpfheimer Nursery School at Vassar College.

This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal by Gannett Publications on January 8, 2012.

On December 11, 2011, our family life changed forever: we adopted a 13 week old puppy.   Like classic expectant parents, we were excited and a little bit nervous.  What would we name him? How would our lives change?  Were we ready? 

As a veteran parent of three children, I was most focused on impending sleepless nights or at the very best, interrupted sleep. Coping with being sleep deprived has never been one of my strengths as a parent.  I was confident that expecting to be sleep deprived was half of the adjustment.

We are now at day 22 and I’ve only been awakened once during the night. Chai Latte sleeps through the night like a perfect puppy. My biggest worry turned out to be no worry at all. Hum, I thought, this is just like when I became a parent for the first time 25 years ago; nothing was what I expected.

Pretty soon I realized that having a new puppy in the house was a lot like having an infant. Raising Chai has been a refresher course in basic parenting 101, regardless whether your baby is human or canine.

#1 Sleep when the puppy sleeps. Although Chai is our first “baby” to sleep through the night, he requires nearly constant vigilance during his waking hours. It is this intensity of focus which dramatically shifts one’s energy reserves, making napping with the puppy an essential survival strategy.

#2 Routines are essential. Having a baby in the house is almost the opposite of having a routine. Chai’s rapid growth makes the rhythm of meeting his needs a moving target. Yet routines provide predictability and repetition.  Early learning requires as much consistent repetition as one can muster (e.g. never before have I longed for puppy diapers!)

#3 Work on self-regulation and self-soothing. Building routines helps to build self-regulation skills. In essence, the routine creates the platform for success, and success creates the learning platform to build self-regulation. One of the consistent early mistakes I made with my children as infants was to immediately meet their every need instead of giving them tools to learn to self-regulate. With Chai, I learned to start by giving him constant attention and then slowly building in other signals, including pauses to build up his ability to wait.

#4 Tag team. Raising a baby is inherently frustrating. It means rearranging every aspect of your life to revolve around the baby’s needs. One of the most valuable tools in your survival kit is learning how to tag team. When you get frustrated, do you have a plan in place to take a break?  My husband and I used to say, “you’re it!” or “I’ll do the dishes now and you can play!”  Remember a tag team can have many players with different strategies and strengths; the trick is you have to be willing to share the playbook.

#5 Cute is worth a lot. It is no accident of Mother Nature that babies and puppies are irresistibly cute. Baby features attract adults and elicit caregiving behaviors. Enjoying those cute moments is invaluable for all.

#6 You can buy out the toy store but nothing replaces playful interaction.  Fatigue from my constant vigilance of Chai’s every move, motivated me to find good puppy toys. I loaded up at the puppy toy store, and eagerly tossed him the newest doggie distractors. That lasted about 2 minutes. At first I couldn’t believe it, but then I laughed at myself. Puppies need to learn how to play, too, and they do that best in playful interactions, just like babies.

#7 Perspective taking is an essential skill.  Although there are many similarities in having an infant and a puppy in the house, there are important (but not always obvious) differences.  In our culture, we tend to treat our puppies like babies, but we need to also be responsible to learn about their canine perspective or ways of learning about the world. This is one of the joys of having a well-matched pet in a family household. Do your homework before you adopt a dog and talk frequently with your children about similarities and differences in perspectives. Anticipate problems and how you might work on solutions. Check out a book at the library or your local bookstore and share in the preparation with all members of your household.  

In the two hours that it took me to write this, I have let Chai outside 6 times, fed him lunch, played with him, and had him on my lap while typing. Thankfully, it is naptime and soon we will be enjoying puppy dreams together.