Re-training a Yorkshire terrier

[beansprout55]

I have a 9 year old Yorkie girl who I really need some help with.

I used to live with her and my parents and she was around my nieces and nephews all the time and was great with them! Ignored them and sometimes played. But since getting married and moving in with my husband we haven't been around children in about 2 and a half years (partly due to Covid).

We took her over to my parents last week and my 7 year old niece was there, the dog was excited and jumped around loads at first, which was fine, but when my niece tried to pat her she kept trying to either lick her face and jump up to do it, or snarl at her as though she was about to bite. We were mortified, thought it was a one off but she did it again.

We don't have a great income so can't afford a dog trainer, and I'm expecting in June. Really anxious about how we can get our girl trained again to be around children!?

Any ideas or YouTube recommendations?
She's otherwise well behaved. I want to nip this in the bud.

Join the FB group Dog Training Advice and Support. Read the compulsory guides and any others that are specific to your issues, then if you can’t find the answers you need you can ask the mods for advice. They are all fully qualified force-free, positive dog trainers.

I would imagine she needs some training around capturing calm - you can watch the Kikopup videos on YouTube to get an idea of what this involves and also some conditioning to associate the presence of children with positive things, which is covered in the FB DTAS guides.

You also need to educate the children she is going to be around about dog behaviour and body language and how to behave appropriately around dogs. The Jack and Billy Puppy Tales book is helpful with this, as is this Lili Chin illustrated book. If you do that now, hopefully she will have built more positive associations with children by the time your baby is born.

In the meantime, I would limit direct interactions with children while you take the necessary steps to help her feel more comfortable with them being around. Keeping her calm and under threshold, starting by working at a distance to change her emotional response to the presence of children, is a logical first step. The DTAS guides should help walk you through this. Similar to puppy socialisation, she doesn’t need to be interacting with them at this stage, just to feel comfortable around them to the extent that she is able to be relaxed and focus on you and that will probably mean them being quite a distance away to begin with and only moving closer when she is ready.