Children and Training
"I have a 6 year old and a ten year old. Can they help with the training of our new puppy?"

Having your children help train your puppy is a great idea. A lot depends on your childs maturity level and size. Many children discipline too hard or too soft. Either one will make the alpha relationship worse and hinder further training. Dogs will take adults as their alpha leader, but they’d rather die than take orders from a kid. That would mean that they are at the bottom of the pecking order, and frequently your dog will fight (bite) to stay a notch above that on the hierarchy.

The most important thing to remember with training a dog is follow through. Correct follow through requires a good attention span for the trainer. It’s usually best to have an adult train the dog and when your dog is behaving well, let your child try to help with the reinforcement exercises. Then have the adult finish the training exercise so that your dog doesn’t remember that he got away with something. Don’t ever let the dog get out of control of your children, and always supervise training sessions.

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