Tips to Help Kids and a Rescue Dog Live Together

By: David Codr

Published Date: September 3, 2020

Jet scaled - Tips to Help Kids and a Rescue Dog Live Together

For this Omaha dog training session we go over tips to help kids and dogs get along to assist 7 year-old rescue Husky Jet in his new home.

Jet was adopted a little over a month ago and has fit into his new family nicely with a few exceptions related to the dog interacting with the kids. Jet nipped one of the children who fell on top of him trying to step over him. This same young child absolutely LOVES her new dog and wants to shower him with kisseds and hugs. Problem is, most dogs don’t like those kind of interactions. Making thing more challanging, the child is slightly too young to fully understand this or read his body langauge.

As Omaha’s dog behavior expert, I have worked with many familys who have problems between their kids and rescue dogs. Usually there are based in miscommunications, but in this case, its too much love for dog, lol. I suggested the family get a life sized stuffed husky doll so that the chld can hug and kiss to her hearts delight. It will also give the parents an opportuity to teach her how and where to pet (and where to not pet).

Stopping the dog from nipping the children was the parent’s primary concern. To make sure the guardians could remember all the tips to help dogs and kids get along with each other, we recorded a video. Some of the things mentioned are easy ways to help kids treat dogs right, but there are also dog wanring signs to watch for and a few other secrets to stop a dog from nipping at kids for underired behaviors. You can get these tips to stop kids from doing things to cause a dog to nip by watching the free positive dog training video below.

Its important to understand that growls, barking, air biting, teeth bearing, moving away and nips are all attempts by the dog to prevent aggression. Fortunately the guardians know that you should not punish or correct a dog for offering these behaviors. Doing so often leads the dog to stopping the warning and moving straight to a bite. The best thing to do in the moment is to increase distance between the dog and the child, then assess if we need to work with the dog to help it feel good about that interaction in the future.

Since some of these tips are too advanced for the young children, I also recommended the use this easy way to motivate kids to interact with dogs in a positive way to earn rewards that I wrote about in my column for the Omaha World-Herald a while back. This is a great way to get young kids to interact with dogs in a positve way and prevent any more do nips of the kids. This works with all kinds of dog breeds and arent hard to do, even if you arent a professional Husky dog trainer.

We went over a number of other tips in this in home Omaha dog training session. To help the family rememebr them all, we filmed a roadmap to success video that you can check out below.

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This post was written by: David Codr