What Can Having Pets Teach You About Parenting?
When I brought my new dog, a 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Grace, home for the holidays last year, I was nervous. I didn’t know how she’d react to the unfamiliar environment, so I kept scanning the floor for items she might swallow. She wasn’t perfectly house-trained yet, so I was constantly watching to see if she started to walk in circles—a sign that she has to go to the bathroom.
After a week with no trouble, my mom gently called me out. “You’re being a helicopter parent,” she said. “Grace might do better if you stopped hovering over her.” The comment jarred me. I’d always assumed that I’d be a good nurturer, but now that I was actually responsible for another creature, it seemed like I might not have the touch. I started to worry about what this meant not only for Grace but also for my future kids. Was I doomed to hover over them one day as well? Or, if I learned to let go a bit with Grace, could I carry those lessons forward when I had my own child?
The idea of a dog as a “starter kid” is a cliché at this point—but there’s a bit of truth to it. Millennials have delayed having children, adopted dogs in droves, and frequently consider those pets to be as much a part of the family as any human, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu recently reported. Many are raising a dog before they have a baby. In fact, in a 2021 survey commissioned by a pet-food brand, four in 10 dog and cat parents said that they got their pet to test whether they were ready for a kid. Of course, raising animals is in many ways not at all comparable to raising children, and no one who doesn’t actually want a dog should get one as a practice baby. That said, pet parenting does have things to teach future parents of humans. Some connections, such as “potty” training, are obvious. But on a broader level, getting a pet requires taking responsibility for another living thing’s well-being. The experience can offer insight into your tendencies as a caregiver—and, with the right amount of self-awareness, a chance to grow.
Parenting preparation is a spectrum. Reading advice books is on one end of it: You might pick up a few tips, but the learning is just theoretical. Caring for human children, perhaps by babysitting, gets you closer to the actual experience. Experts told me that it’s close to the best practice you can have, though the average person’s opportunities to do it are dwindling as teen babysitters grow rarer and families tend to be smaller, giving kids fewer opportunities to watch younger siblings and cousins. Responsibly raising pets (especially those that require more attention, such as cats and dogs) is somewhere in between; dogs are probably the most relevant, given how much work training one takes. Crucially, caring for a pet lets you learn by doing, which Susan Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota who specialized in parenting education, told me is more effective than reading generic advice.
Both dogs and kids need help learning how to behave—though with dogs it’s of course more a matter of simple dos and don’ts than the morality of right and wrong we try to instill in children. But some of the principles of good dog training do translate to teaching young kids. Experts generally agree that for both groups, positive reinforcement should guide discipline. Whether the problem is a toddler coloring on the wall or a puppy chewing on your shoes, the parenting coach Elisabeth Stitt recommends responding with a quick correction followed by a warm distraction. You might say no and then give the dog a toy bone and the child a coloring book. Perhaps most important is to keep these expectations consistent and to repeat lessons over and over. “Parents will say to me, ‘I’ve told my kids a million times,’” Stitt told me. “Good. That’s what you need to do.” Grace still pulls on her leash at least once a day when I walk her—and each time I have to stop, wait for her to come back, and then give her a treat when we start back up again.
What’s more, both dogs and infants have no choice but to communicate without words. Learning to read a dog’s cues can help strengthen the skill of “perspective taking,” or the ability to see the world through another’s point of view, Gail Melson, a professor emeritus at Purdue University studying families and animals, told me. Developing that muscle might make it easier to later interpret a child’s early attempts at self-expression. Having firsthand knowledge that what seems like misconduct could actually be a signal of fear, boredom, or frustration is helpful for developing the patience required for parenting. Rather than reacting with anger, perhaps you’ll know to think, “What’s the motivation behind that behavior, and how can we meet whatever those needs are?” Shelly Volsche, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls studying human-animal interaction, explained to me.
And if you get a dog with a partner, you’ll be doing all of this learning alongside them. Think of it as a rehearsal for some of the logistics of co-parenting. “A lot of times, couples get blindsided because they don’t necessarily have a plan for who’s going to feed the baby or who’s going to diaper the baby, who’s going to get up at night,” Darby Saxbe, a University of Southern California professor studying the transition to parenthood, told me. Dogs aren’t nearly as much work, but you still have to divvy up who walks and feeds them. Doing that fairly “might set a healthy precedent” for splitting child-care duties, Saxbe said. When you do eventually have a kid, perhaps you’ll already have a framework for discussing a shared approach.
But more than chore charts and discipline, raising a pet—and, to a far greater extent, raising a child—demands making sacrifices. No matter how tired you are in the morning, you have to get out of bed to soothe a crying baby or to take a dog out to pee, Saxbe explained. Workdays will get interrupted if your kid or pet gets sick. And you never get a break, unless you secure a sitter—but even in those cases, you’ll still want to be reachable in emergencies. “That is a really dramatic shift, I think, for people that have never had a baby or a pet,” Saxbe told me.
Adjusting your schedule to the rhythms of life with a dog might help make space for an eventual baby too. Perhaps you’ll have redone your budget to afford vet bills—a decision some of Laurent-Simpson’s research subjects have made. Maybe you’ll be used to staying out late less frequently to get home for your dog. You may have lined up friends who could watch a pet or a baby in a pinch; as experts told me, building community is vital for any type of caregiving.
On a deeper level, caring for a pet can spur personal reflection. You may get a window into “Who am I as a nurturer?” Volsche explained. Are you too much of a pushover? Do you dole out discipline too harshly? “The parenting styles are very similar, independent of whether we’re talking about dogs or whether we’re talking about human children, because we’re focused on the human caregiver’s behavior,” Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State University studying human-animal interactions, told me. And, as Udell’s research has shown, the ideal parenting style—authoritative parenting—is the same for dogs and kids. Authoritative parents have high expectations—for a dog’s training or a kid’s schoolwork, say—but are caring and responsive to their dependent’s needs. Though the needs may be very different, caretakers of both pets and humans should strive for a balance of warmth and structure, Udell said.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that people with pets will take advantage of the opportunity to start mastering that balance. Unfortunately, no one I spoke with knew of any research on the transition from pet parent to human parent. Sometimes people learn through a process of “generalization,” Melson explained, and apply what they pick up in one realm to another. But at other times, learning tends more toward “compartmentalization.” And we just don’t know whether pet parents are generalizing these lessons or compartmentalizing them. That said, nearly everyone I spoke with agreed that people could learn some parenting skills from having pets—especially if they approached the process with intention.
So I’ve been trying to do that with Grace, and as I’ve grown more confident, so has she. When I first got her, she was scared of almost everything: cars, going on walks, the vacuum cleaner. My lap was her safety blanket, and I was eager to soothe her. But, with practice, I’ve gotten better at tolerating my discomfort with her discomfort. Rather than preemptively comforting her when we go somewhere new, I’ve learned to practice patience, give lots of positive reinforcement (read: treats), and gently encourage her to explore; the world really has so many things to sniff. She still recoils when motorcycles pass, but at other times, she’ll chase the leaves that drift by and pounce on pine cones. I’m there if she needs reassurance, but I’m finding that she’s turning to me, trembling, less and less.