Living with Kids and Dogs
Posted: July 10, 2010 Filed under: Lotsa Lhasa Info 2 CommentsI stumbled across a great resource and had to share! Colleen Pelar, CPDT. I haven’t yet been able to get a copy of Kids and Dogs: A Professional’s Guide to Helping Families, but after perusing Living With Kids and Dogs…Without Losing Your Mind, it’s surely great too. Colleen even has a Living with Kids and Dogs website!
Hoisting the reviews from Amazon:
Kids and Dogs Reviews
This book is both fantastic and unique. Every dog trainer, groomer, dog walker, shelter worker and general dog aficionado who would like to help parents improve the life of a dog living with children should read this book. It’s filled with first-hand experience and stories that illustrate the points in memorable way. <P>As both a parent and a person who counsels dog owners, Colleen Pelar is able to take us into the mind of the parent so that we understand the misconceptions that they have that drive them to make the dangerous mistakes they make with regarding how their child and dog interact. More importantly she offers many useful tips and suggestions as to how anyone can help educate parents about the relationship between their kids and pets. –Dr. Sophia Yin, author of Low-Stress Handling, Restraint, and Behavior Modification of Dogs and Cats and How to Behave So Your Dog Behaves
Reading Kids and Dogs is like drinking cool, clean water in the middle of a hot, barren dessert! This clear and helpful book fills a gaping hole in the dog literature–how professionals in the field can help people trying to raise kids and dogs at the same time. I give it all paws up and a body wag from the shoulders back. –Patricia B. McConnell, PhD, CAAB, author of The Other End of the Leash, For the Love of a Dog, and Tales of Two Species
As a dog training and behavior professional without human children, I plead guilty to many of the inappropriate assumptions and unrealistic expectations that trainer/author Colleen Pelar describes in her latest work. This book is an invaluable resource for dog aficionados, professional or not, who seek to make relationships between families and their canine companions more successful. –Pat Miller, author of The Power of Positive Dog Training and training editor for The Whole Dog Journal
Living with Kids and Dogs Reviews
At last! A kids-and-dogs book for parents written by someone who “gets it.”This is a wonderful book. Useful, useful, useful information—all the main points in an extremely easy-to-read style. As a trainer and a mom, Colleen sees the full picture.” — Dr. Ian Dunbar
Living with Kids and Dogs . . . Without Losing Your Mind by Colleen Pelar, CPDT, covers more than introducing a baby to the family dog. It has chapters devoted to each stage of a child’s life with parental pointers for setting their family up for success while raising kids and dogs together.
~ Parenting books say control your dog; dog-training books say control your kids. The reality is far more complex and goes way beyond placing blame on either children or dogs for being who they are. ~
Living with Kids & Dogs . . . Without Losing Your Mind provides busy parents with simple, realistic advice to help ensure that the relationship between their kids and their dog is safe and enjoyable for all.
You will learn how to • Help your child and dog develop a strong relationship, built on trust and cooperation • Set your family up for success with a minimum of effort • Recognize canine stress signals and know when your dog is getting worried about normal kid activity • Identify serious behavior problems before someone gets hurt • Provide specific help for managing the interactions with dogs through each stage of your kids’ lives from infancy through the teen years • Prevent your child from becoming part of a growing statistic—children who have been bitten by a dog.
Kunza at FleetFire Timbers 
An observation: Just curious…the lhasa apso is most often paired with “mature” adults…how many young families with kids are enjoying our “Tibetan Treasures” as the family dog?
Kathy
Good question Kathy. Pondering back through the dogs and puppies I’ve placed through the years, a ‘young family’ is a rarity. Several (now) young women continue to have Lhasa Apsos because of growing up with one of my dogs. Are we, as breeders and fanciers, missing potential fanciers? ??
Kellie and Ronnit grew up with Daffy, short for Daffodil. Her original name was Rica, as in Americano. She was one of four puppies born to Olivia, sired by Hatter. Her siblings were Chiata, Latte and Mocha. Which reminds me… Mocha. But this paragraph is about Daffy’s kids. Daffy died last year at the age of 13 years. The girls had both started lives of their own. Ronnit is still in college and chomping at the bit to get a dog, preferably a Lhasa Apso. She has friended me on Facebook…which is really fun. So has her sister Kellie. Kellie recently moved back to Colorado from California and I now groom her two rescue Lhasa Apsos. Would either of these young woman been familiar with the breed had I decided not to place Rica in a family with young children?
Mocha, Daffy’s sister, also lived in a family with children. Actually, she was in two different families. The first family was a mistake. Mocha would play with the kids, but when she was done playing, the ten-year old boy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She nipped him several times. Was this her fault? The mother told me her son wouldn’t listen to her or Mocha. ‘Nough said! Mocha came back home and was placed shortly thereafter in her Forever Home. Joni and Scott didn’t have children at the time, but eventually did. Mocha, too, died last year. I got the nicest letter from Joni telling me what a great dog she was. Here’s an excerpt:
“Anyway, I’m sorry to bring such bad news, but wanted you to know about our sweet little Mocha. She had been an energetic and playful dog up until the very end. Our kids LOVED her very much because she acted like a playful puppy most of the time. She still snapped whenever anyone had a stick-like object in their hands, so our kids learned not to be around her with light-sabers, hockey sticks, that sort of stuff. And although she sometimes nipped at their ankles and arms, she never bit them to the point that she broke their skin. Whatever happened to her as a puppy obviously impacted her into adulthood. But, for the most part, she was great with the kids and loved to play with them and their friends. They are very sad that she’s gone…”
Another woman in Fort Collins grew up with a puppy from one my first litters. As a married woman she returned to me and over the years has had two dogs of her own from me.
Are we missing out???