Anxious dogs, like anxious people, need help managing and reducing distress
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I do think though that dog's can pick up on their owners emotions. If you're thinking "Oh no, I'm going to leave Fido alone for three hours I'm really worried he's going to rip the house up or be really upset when I'm gone." rather than "I'm just nipping out. Fido sleeps most of the day anyway and will be fine." then the dog will pick up on that and become anxious.
Same reason why so many people do the same to children - they're set in their views and are unwilling accept that they might be wrong.
Also, it's less work (at lesst in the short term). All the more reason to continue.
The official word is that adopting a gentle and emotionally aware stance has to be paired with a strong sense of boundaries, but it’s often very unclear how to differentiate between which part of the response to a given situation should be the boundary (“we don’t speak like that in this family; I won’t be responding until you talk to me in a respectful way”) vs the emotional deep dive (“it sounds like you’re processing some big feelings right now, let’s talk about what’s going on for you”).
Instead of engaging with the truly challenging parts of the approach, a lot of advocates model kind of what’s in the parent post— condescension, dismissal, and an assumption that the other party is simply unable or unwilling to learn how to do something that’s obviously superior.
a gentle and emotionally aware stance has to be paired with a strong sense of boundaries,
To me, a strong sense of self if probably more useful.
Establishing boundaries presumes an expertise that doesn't exist.
Parenting is learned on the job.
Learned over the better part of a lifetime.
Or all of it since we learn parenting by being parented as children...from people who were learning on the job.
we don’t speak like that in this family; I won’t be responding until you talk to me in a respectful way
Are you prepared to walk the walk and kick your child out of the family for responding with "fuck you"?
Never mind that withholding conversation from a child is punishment?
"Please don't talk to me like that. I don't like it," is the simplest thing that might work. It's also a good way to talk to other people. Because human relationships boil down to a good will, negotiation, or violence.
Boundaries bound operating on goodwill.
I think that some of this debate comes down to what the ultimate purpose of parenting is— is it to be an eternal safe space for our kids? Somewhere that they can always feel understood and welcomed and heard, where they'll never be asked to consider if their feelings reflect an accurate perception of the world, whether their attitudes have shaped how they experience certain situations, or if their own words and actions have helped create a circumstance they're now frustrated by? Or is parenting about preparing kids to ultimately become citizens of the real world, where teachers, colleagues, bosses, neighbours, doctors, police, airline staff and others will require a certain standard of behaviour and will have basically zero interest in whatever your "reasons" are for why that standard cannot be met at a particular moment.
In truth, the answer is somewhere in the middle. The best parents can both be that safe and listening space, while also gently challenging us to grow and do better (yes, even into adulthood). But I don't see a lot of that nuance from many gentle parenting advocates, who sound much more hard-line, casting non-believers as being "set in their ways", and often responding pretty negatively to parents' fatigue with the extremely exhausting work that it can be constantly taking on and processing the emotions of everyone around them.
On the other hand, there are now a bunch of voices calling for a more balanced approach than what one might find on Instagram and Tiktok:
- https://mashable.com/article/gentle-parenting-social-media-p...
- https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/gen...
- https://filterfreeparents.com/gentle-parenting-is-physically...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/style/millennial-earnest-...
I see friends taking parenting courses, and raising their kids 'by the rules'. It seems so mechanical, and, from the behavior I see it isn't working very well either, just and endless battle against 'the rules'.
My kids are a bit older now, and looking back I see intuition is important in raising kids. You know your own boundaries, and can be strict about them, but you also love your kids, and can even enjoy and laugh seeing them push against rules and discovering their the world. A nice read on this is 'French children don't throw food' [1]
Trusting yourself and your kids makes you less likely to be angry or scream at them. I found raising your voice in many cases just means you don't trust yourself and you don't trust that your kids respect you.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/20/french-childre...
My current working theory is that toddler temper tantrums are this. I mean from the opposite direction; the kid is not on solid footing yet and doesn't think the grownups take them seriously enough.
For the longest while we were making the utmost effort to do the respectful parenting thing, but as he's growing to have very strong opinions that are not always reasonable, this is... harder.
Staying calm in such a moment can do wonders and de-escalate, but it's hard, especially when I'm tired and need a moment of quiet :)
I would argue that the "emotional deep dive" example is not merely asking how someone is feeling.
> it sounds like you’re processing some big feelings right now, let’s talk about what’s going on for you
Speaking from experience when I was a kid, being spoken to in this manner always felt belittling.
I think a lot of it comes down to how people usually communicate with the kid.
Like I can’t possibly imagine my Dad saying “Looks like we got some big feelings here, want to talk about it?” It sounds so silly and patronizing.
But a “Boona, I can’t help unless you tell me what’s wrong” is completely normal to my ears.
For all intents and purposes they’re the same question though. I think kids just just know us more than we give them credit for, so if you pull out the “Journal approved parenting voice” when that’s not how you talk normally they’ll react accordingly.
You can ask about feelings with a gentle tone, a supportive gaze at eye level, and a hand on the shoulder. Or you can do it from above with an eye roll and a sarcastic bite.
I can easily see a frustrated parent giving in to their own emotions and using the latter approach.
Questions often reflect status relationships where some people have the privilege to expect answers and thus carry a demeanor of expecting answers to their questions.
Questions are used as a reminder that the other person is obligated to answer.
I didn’t realize I could sit and process my feelings until I was in college.
And honestly, my upbringing was pretty stable as far as things go—my parents were weird, but whose weren’t.
Why not?
Of all the people in the world I ask “how are you feeling” it’s my family that I both expect and receive the most in-depth answers and questions. These are people I live with and live with me, our emotions are deeply rooted and entwined with each other.
I'd extend that to all humans and all animals.
Many people can't even wrap their heads around NOT using punishment to control behaviour and react very negatively to the idea of treatment or interventions that, in their mind, look like "rewarding" the "bad" behaviour.
I have a counter surfer at home, and we tried the negative reinforcement, time-outs, loud noises ect, and all it did was give her food aggression where she never had any before.
Training leave it and removing opportunities for her to steal worked out way better long term. Now if she finds a chicken bone or something on a walk I can just take it from her when before when she’d do her damndest to hide it.
Yea, that's what we did to, but I don't really consider that training the dog not to jump on the counter.
They are failing to control their own emotions.
There are plenty who believe that withdrawing privileges is an entirely normal and appropriate response when children misbehave.
This isn't punishment, although some children consider it to be.
Children are not small adults, but they are surprisingly capable of understanding incentives.
"If you behave well you can have ice cream. If you behave badly, you don't get ice cream. It's your choice."
It's awful to teach children that behaviour doesn't matter. Actions do have consequences.
You can't just redefine it as "not punishment" because you want to use that method in child rearing.
"Actions have consequences" as a statement isn't really up for much debate, it's more of a observation on how the universe works. If we fall far enough, we hurt outselves.
Gravity isn't punishing us when we fall, even if it may feel like that at times - the scars on my right arm from a cycling accident last year are still visible.
I'm not saying you're a bad parent for punishing your child, I'm saying you could be a better parent if you stopped leaning on punishment as a parenting tool.
Also, stop telling your child you aren't punishing them because they will ALWAYS remember that bullshit. At least own up to the fact that you are punishing them and tell them why.
It isn't:
"[..] people confuse negative reinforcement with punishment, but these are two different concepts"[0]
[0] https://www.webmd.com/parenting/what-to-know-about-negative-...
It is amazing the mental hoops people can jump through.
Our eldest had his computer briefly confiscated not that long ago. He was, of course, cross with me when it happened.
The day afterwards he came to me and thanked me for taking it away(!)
Him: "I was spending way too much time playing games, I see that now" Me: "You're welcome to have it back" Him: "No, I'm not sure I want it in my room. It's too much of a distraction"
A corollary to this is that it's very hard to get a dog to unlearn something once it has learned it, especially if you can't remove the positive reward. For many dogs, behaviors like barking, chewing, and digging are self-soothing. That is to say the dog feels rewarded just for performing the actions when stressed. For this reason, battling entrenched separation anxiety is very difficult and takes many months, as the author experienced.
I wish this information was more well known. Dogs, as puppies, are very malleable, and you can raise a well adjusted dog pretty easily provided you're willing to put in a lot of work for the first few months of life. Once dogs reach adulthood, things become much harder as you're having to unlearn entrenched behaviors in addition to teaching new ones. This is especially important to understand if you're considering rescuing a dog. Rescuing adult dogs is noble, but you're basically playing the lottery with potential problematic behavioral issues.
In other words: by selecting for responsiveness to human emotions, to what degree have we made dogs' brains more like our own?
Now I'm going to cuddle my pup Henry.
If you're American there is a big chance that you're using the word pup for a dog of any age. This in itself is a tell-tale sign of the way many people - especially those who are wont to write or speak about their dogs in public places - think about them, as permanent juveniles who will never "grow up".
As for "pup" think of it like a term of endearment similar to sweetie, babe, honey, etc etc.
The removal of testes/ovaries before puberty has something to do with that.
Go to the third world and look at the dogs in the street. They have teats for nursing puppies and balls for making them, all plain as day. What dogs look like in developed countries isn't natural.
I wonder why there are so many dogs in the street ;-)
There's nowhere where dogs are "natural." They're a species that was bred to the whims and desires of humans, almost always to the detriment of their evolutionary fitness.
Yes, definitely. The cats sabotaged the economy to increase financial insecurity, and the dogs infiltrated r/Parenting to raise human parenting standards to unattainble levels. As a result, people are no longer willing to have babies, and both species have raised their living standards, enjoying the good life and laughing behind our backs. /s
Also, it’s important not to overly anthropomorphize evolution. It’s not as though animals are choosing their evolutionary strategy, so I find this language misleading.
Take care of your kid like you'd a long-lived dog, and that's enough attention for long enough. By the end of it, the kid has grown into an adult.
The problem is that parents are expected to parent too much. American car centric infrastructure affects this a lot. But, latch key kids turned out just fine, and there is nothing wrong with that model.
Pets may not be actively pursuing a parasitic relationship with humans, but it does appear to be manifesting in that form for certain lonely people.
Animals have a dual strategy.
They can be part of the family or they can be a working animal.
> Is there a direct connection between falling birth rates and treating animals as if they were beloved children?
I could see treating animals as children being caused by falling birth rates. The opposite seems unlikely, since people have kept pets for a very long time.
https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/welcome-to-search-engine
Edit: typo
I'm ok when seeing adults doing that to their kids (i.e. treating said kids as grown-ups), after all they're their kids and I don't have children of my own, but when I see the same sort of behaviour being transplanted to handling dogs (or pets, more generally), then I get really angry. Again, dogs, and animals, are not humans, applying "human-like treatment" to them means harming said dogs and said animals.
And more to the point of the article, as the owner of a very sensitive Border Collie myself the "secret" of avoiding separation anxiety for your dog is not to treat your every home departure like you're heading off to the Antarctic, treat it like it's nothing, like you're just going to get rid of the trash. No matter if you're gone for 5 minutes or for 4-5 hours. This applies for both leaving the house and getting back to the house.
he now knows that it means to not get up and start pacing anxiously to go with me or to try to follow me out the door. usually he just goes in his easychair (it's turned into his doggie daybed, basically) or lays down in the sunlight. my guest bath is also his little cave, since it's usually dark and the floor is cool. i've seen him on camera just hang out in these spots until i get back.
paired with the standard issue "let's go for a walk" or "let's go outside" it seems to really communicate what exactly is going on so he isn't confused. i've also added "peepee?" to ask if he wants to pee without making him think we're going for a long walk. this also works with food related words ... it's still kind of crazy to me he actually knows what i'm saying and will react according to what he actually wants at the moment. i just have to cycle through the words.
Millions of children on this planet are malnourished or suffering because of wars, climate change or just bad government. Is it ethical to pay a fortune for magnetic brain stimulation of your dog, if somewhere else in the world several people's lives could be saved with that money?
But if this is your acid test for ethical living then you’re going to quickly discover that everyone with disposable income lives unethically. Which is honestly probably true but nobody wants to hear it.
Unless you've optimized your life by going into the highest-paying career you can and giving virtually all of your money (minus the bare minimum you need to survive) to help those in need, I don't think this is a reasonable argument to be making.
One of the problem with this argument being that it's not the same set of people that can/will work on these separate issues, and solving one does not prevent solving the other one. Also, the money spent for one issue would not necessarily go to the other issue anyway: they are not linked.
Structural issues with our worldwide distribution of wealth system are causing climate change and poverty, not taking care of the dogs, and this is what needs to be fixed.
This assumes every child is a net positive for its immediate group, its local group, its country and the global world as a whole.
While you can argue for the first, the latter 3 are not evident.
> Is it ethical to pay a fortune for magnetic brain stimulation of your dog, if somewhere else in the world several people's lives could be saved with that money?
Is it ethical for you to be typing this comment, whereas you could be working instead to earn money to buy food to save several people's lives somewhere in the world?
I’ve always been weirdly frugal and I think this is the real reason that I don’t admit. Seems unfair to spend a lot of money on anything.
I would say that any kind of expense beyond what you’d pay as a poor college student would fall into this category, though, if you want to be consistent.
I’m not however donating much, though. My plan is to build a pile and donate it when I pass.
The reactions vary from, the dying child is thousands of miles away (and your unhappy dog is not), to, if you're not maximizing your life on donating every possible penny you can spare to charity, you have no right to post a thought like this. Is this really the common view on HN on how we should live our lives?
It's an unfortunate fact of reality that foreign aid, though very well-intentioned, benefits the rulers and generals of corrupt governments more than it benefits their citizens. See "The Dictator's Handbook" by Mesquita and Smith.
The only solution is to uplift the entire country, anything highly targeted will not work.
Just stop manufacturing them...
I was bitten by a dog once and the owners immediately started trying to explain to me why it was actually my fault that I, standing there minding my own business, made the dog bite me! They eventually remembered that I got bit and asked if I was hurt.
I lived in an apartment building next to some people with a new puppy who barked at night - when I complained to them about it I got an earful about how its ok for them to violate noise ordinances and disturb my sleep, it’s a puppy, it can’t control itself, how could I possibly be so mean!?
I refused an invitation to a party once because they had a lot of dogs and I’m very allergic - I was told I was being super rude and that I should just pop some meds and get over it. I asked them why they expected me to make myself miserable for the dogs sake when they could just kennel it for the weekend?
I own fish - the amount of times someone has told me that my pet is “lame” or “silly” or “boring” and that I should have gotten a dog is ridiculous. Like fuck off.
TL;DR Dog owners can be really obnoxious and self-righteous. There’s a mutual understanding that if people can’t control their children, they are bad parents. But not being able to control your dog is for some reason much more accepted.
I’ve always assumed it has nothing to do with me or my dog, but is to protect others from my dog.