4 Reasons Why Your Kids Should Have a Dog

4 Reasons Why Your Kids Should Have a Dog

Childhood is a magical time, filled with imagination, discovery, stories of knights in shining armor, princesses in castles, enchanted woods, and strange creatures.

Childhood is also a time discovering our boundaries and how we relate to the broader world and the people and things that make it up. It’s a time for learning about things like responsibility and care, while still having fun and enjoying the relative freedom that comes with this early stage of life.

Both for your child’s emotional and social development, and for their overall joy and happiness, having a dog even foufou puppies can be a fantastic way of enriching your family home, and your child’s early life. nonetheless be a significant help.

The Chocolate Labrador will be an excellent choice—a friendly, family dog with a great capacity for support. Find them here on https://chocolatelabradorretriever.ca/lab-retriever-michigan. Get a healthy amount of exercise. Exercise with your dog can help your dog live longer, here are some examples of the length of Pug’s life, and your kids live healthier.

Here are just a few of the reasons why you should consider getting your child a dog.

Having a dog will teach them about responsibility.

Dogs are living creatures, with needs, emotions, moods, and temperaments all of their own. As such, they need to be dealt with carefully, and various obligations that must be met by anyone who wants to be a responsible dog owner.

Unless you’re willing to hire a dog walker, for example, you will need to do the job yourself. A dog will also need to be fed, groomed, played with, trained, and socialized appropriately.

While it’s not necessarily realistic to expect your child to attend to these duties wholly by themselves (you definitely shouldn’t let a small child take a dog for a walk around the block without supervision, for example), having your child get involved in the care and upbringing of the dog can be a tremendous way of teaching them about the fundamentals of responsibility.

The lessons are clear. A dog isn’t just a toy, it’s a living creature, and so it requires a degree of respect and care. A dog is a fun companion, but owning a pet isn’t just a one-way street where the dog entertains you, you have to take care of the dog and treat it, as well.

A dog provides constant companionship

As a parent, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to offer up your time and attention in every instance when your child wants to play or is feeling bored or lonely. Even the most diligent and caring parent will need to make dinner, have a nap, or do some work, sooner or later.

For only children or children with a shy disposition who don’t find socializing with other kids to be a natural process, loneliness can become a real problem, along with the various adverse effects that this entails for confidence, happiness, and well-being.

They offer a constant sense of companionship and can help enormously to help draw your child out of their shell and put aside the feelings of loneliness that might otherwise present a major problem.

While there’s no substitute for human contact, and while you should, of course, take whatever steps you can to help improve your child’s social development. Develop their confidence and help them to adjust to the world around them. Having a furry friend at home who’s always up for a game and a cuddle can nonetheless be a significant help.

A dog can offer excellent learning opportunities

A family pet isn’t just a companion and a playmate for your child; it also provides a series of excellent learning opportunities for your child.

If you involve your child in the upbringing and training of your dog, in particular, they will naturally need to learn things about the processes involved in doing so. One excellent idea in this regard can be to buy your child, kid-friendly books on taking care of dogs, as well as the history of the different breeds, and so on.

Before too long, your child will have developed a reasonably clear idea on what it is that dogs can eat, and should not feed, what functions different dog breeds initially served, the importance of proper exercise and socialization for the dog, the bits of dog psychology relevant to training a dog, and more.

This heightened understanding of just how a dog is raised and cared for can easily spill over into a broader series of interests and discoveries. Perhaps, from the initial interactions with the dog, your child will begin asking about the origin of dogs in general, and then, in turn, about how wolves behave in the wild, and how these differ from dogs.

Dogs can also teach children a lot about other things, indirectly. Such as the dynamics of play.

A dog can offer excellent opportunities for exercise, and get away from technology

One of the many things that should be of concern to parents today is the degree to which kids are spending all of their time — from younger, and younger ages — engrossed in what’s going on, on various screens.

Video games, web-surfing (you wouldn’t let them do that unsupervised, would you?) and television are undoubtedly riveting mediums of entertainment, but there’s good reason to be skeptical about the effects of these on your child’s development.

For one thing, too much time in front of screens naturally steals some of the wonders of the real world. With your child literally structuring their brain — as Norman Doidge shows in his book “The Brain That Changes Itself”, regular behaviours really do change the neuronal connections in the brain — to respond primarily to digital space, it can become increasingly difficult for your child even to enjoy time spent away from the computer or TV.

Of course, this is tragic in and of itself, but it also brings with it the added downside that your child will, consequently, be far less likely to get a healthy amount of exercise.

A dog can be a great solution here, firstly by giving your child something engaging and exciting to deal with in the real world, away from the screens, and secondly by providing an excellent opportunity for exercise. A child who’s running around the garden with the dog, or playing catch with it, is indeed likely to get their heart-rate up.

Thank you,

Glenda, Charlie and David Cates