What age can children have pets? Sausage dogs???

[tildaandarchiesmummy]

My dd is 4 and DS is 2 and baby no.3 will arrive in June. My DD and DS really want a dog. I work two days a week and my mum would be at home on those days so there is no problem with walking the dog.

I would like to know are my children old enough to understand pets and able to take part in looking after them? I would be looking to get a miniature Dashshund if we decided to get a dog. Are these dogs good with young children? How do you find respectable breeders for such dogs???

I've never owned a Dashund before but I do believe they can be quite nasty, stubborn little buggers with a tendancy towards being a bit violent and hard to train. I might be wrong though.

Staffies and Greys otoh make excellent family pets and can be found a in a rescue near you.

I agree with the Staffies :) I grew up with one. And he was like another brother to me and my DB

There are lovely dashunds and nasty ones like any breed. I think if you really want your DC to be really actively involved 6 years is about the minimum which they can truly understand the need to care for their pet. This comes both as a vet who regularly presents pet care to pre-schoolers and school age children. Also as a mum who got a cat when DD was 3.5years loved him, but no thought of implications of caring/not caring for cat. Then we got dog when DD 6.5years old she really understood the importance of all his care and whilst she doesn't enjoy it she gets that poos need to be picked up and will do it well.

I was brought up around dogs from birth, taught how to behave with them, and was taking them for walks with the family pretty much as soon as I could walk. However, with all dogs, children need to be taught to respect dogs, let sleeping dogs lie, retreat if the dog growls, not chase a dog, let the dog come to them, not hurt the dog, not pick the dog up etc. etc.

For breeds, I would recommend a papillon. They're a very pretty, toy-sized dog that are excellent with small children - there were three throughout my childhood (although two died when I was young), and they were all wonderful with children. They definitely tend to think that they're much bigger than they really are, and certainly the one that I had a hand in training was always very eager to please, and so fairly easy to teach.

On the other hand, I wouldn't recommend pomeranians - roughly the same size, but cantankerous as anything and often with a dislike of small children and a shorter temper!

I've a 5year old, 2 year old and nearly three month old baby and we've just got a shih tzu puppy. It's early days but I've researched the breed - small, don't shed, don't need tonnes of exercise, friendly and good with children. We were going to wait until our youngest was older but we miss having a dog and we spend our lives at parks/woods etc.

I have no illusions the care is down to me and DH. We have lots of pets and while both DS1 and DS2 like to help feed them it's not something they do daily. I do think it's great for children to grow up with animals especially dogs who really do love you.

I'd probably wait until after your baby is here - we've been very lucky DD1 is a dream baby otherwise we wouldn't have considered it while she was quite so young.