The value of having a protection dog in your family home goes far beyond the obvious safety benefits. The presence of these highly trained dogs in your child’s life can aid psychological development in extraordinary ways. These dogs act as committed companions while teaching nurturing skills and helping build empathy. Your protection dog can also provide a constant sense of security and relieve stress that could otherwise negatively impact your child’s health and happiness. If you are on the fence about getting a protection dog or puppy, think about how that acquisition will benefit your children through every stage of their lives.

Committed Companion

Through the formative years, children greatly benefit from having a committed companion by their side. As long as they are treated lovingly, family protection dogs never unfairly judge children like their peers might. When you have a protection dog in the house, your kids know they are always coming home to a friend who loves them unconditionally. This connection tends to help kids forge healthy relationships with their peers and cushions social blows that occur throughout life. Does it really get any better than that?

Build Nurturing Skills

When you encourage your kids to play a role in the care of your family’s protection dog, they learn how to appropriately nurture other living beings. You can have your kids play a major role in feeding, walking and trick training your dog to foster the development of these nurturing skills. Your kids will build a positive outlook on taking responsibility for the care of animals, people and even plants in their lives. There really is no better way to build respect and compassion for all living things.

Model for Empathy

Protection dogs naturally model empathy to help kids learn how to consider the feelings and perspective of the animals and people around them. Dogs who are treated with empathy give unending love and trust to even the youngest of their owners. You may be asking, “How Do I Know This?” Well, I have been catering and loving dogs for most of my life at Full Contact K9. Full Contact K9 does professional dog training in Atlanta, Ga. This reciprocal relationship helps guide your kids into fostering healthy relationships through childhood and beyond. Kids with family protection dogs quickly learn that their actions affect the health, happiness, and well-being of everyone in their lives. Daily pats and gentle care are a small price to pay for such a huge life lesson.

Constant Sense of Security

Building a sense of security in your kids is a lifelong pursuit that can be impacted by incidents outside of your control. With family protection dogs in the house, you can partner with your pet to give your kids the best chance at feeling safe and secure at all times. These dogs will alert to potential problems and stand in the face of danger for their beloved families. You will never feel let down by these highly-trained dogs. And your kids will learn that they are safe and well-protected at all times with their dog by their side. I, personally, combined this with remodeling work and it made my house feel like a safe haven.

Stress Relief

Chronic high levels of stress can have a negative effect on the wellbeing of your children. As parents, it is tough to know just how to respond to those stressors. Thankfully, protection dogs provide immense stress relief with just their presence alone. When kids and protection dogs snuggle or play together, stress tends to melt away even quicker and may even remain at bay for the remainder of the day, barring additional incidents. Not only does this benefit your child’s mental well-being, but their physical health as well. If you want to check out more studies on this topic, here is a great post on the health benefits of pets. With less stress in childhood, your kids are less likely to have resulting developmental delays or serious health repercussions in the future.

Reading Help

Dogs are excellent at listening to their little humans read to them on an ongoing basis. They never judge the reader for mispronouncing words or struggling with sentence construction. When kids read to dogs, they feel less stressed while learning, which means they spend more time working on their reading abilities. These kids learn how to read faster than ever while learning to enjoy the process and understanding the value of this relationship. Pretty great, huh?

Source

https://buttehumane.org/family-pets-teach-children-empathy/ 

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/toxic-stress/ 

https://thebark.com/content/reading-dogs-help-children-learn