Training a Puppy to Sit Instead of Jump Up on People

Charlie is a little puppy in Omaha who needed help to stop jumping up on people and learn how to sit to ask for attention, called social manding.

After I arrived I sat down with Charlie’s guardians to discuss their main puppy behavior concerns and learned that they were worried about Charlie jumping up on people. To help them with this I taught them how to use social manding. Social manding simply means that your puppy offers to sit to get things that they want such as attention or before feeding them. In other words, it is there way of saying please! To see how I accomplished this you can watch the video below.

As you can see in the video, Charlie offered a sit and I didn’t need to use a command word sit to ask him to do so. When puppies are this young they often give you many different behaviors and when you pet them you are rewarding whatever they are doing. By petting Charlie or picking him up when he sits, it will make him more likely to repeat this behavior again and again.

By the end of the session Charlie was looking to his guardians for leadership and direction. As a Cavachon trainer I would suggest continuing down the path of using positive reinforcement to reward Charlie for good behavior and to ignore most unwanted behavior (unless it is harmful to Charlie or someone around him). We wrapped up this puppy training session with Charlie’s Roadmap to Success video, which you can watch below.