Thoughts on Raising Sentient Beings

How shaping little humans shaped me...

I was recently a guest on a podcast and among the many topics we discussed, one was about the interplay between raising puppies and raising children. The question was essentially whether raising puppies affected the way in which I parented my children. It was such a great question and has left me thinking about it ever since.

As I explained on the podcast, it’s actually the other way around. I think the reason I perceive the puppies differently than through a traditional “me human, you dog” lens is precisely because of the lessons I learned from my children. Just as I reflected deeply on what was happening in their developing brains, I did the same once we began raising puppies.

An example. My two youngest were born 19 months apart and those toddler years were challenging. I remember bone-deep exhaustion and the flood of relief when the two of them were finally asleep for the night. I also remember being surprised at how anger would flash in me when a three-year-old did something three-year-oldish like throwing a toy metal airplane at me (and horrifying himself as much as me when it struck me on the forehead - he cried harder at the blood coming from my head than from whatever prompted the tantrum in the first place). 

But this is where my children taught me. I distinctly remember thinking, in the midst of tantrum-induced chaos, “He is a person, too. Like me, he is experiencing a full range of emotions and thoughts that are driving his behavior.”

Parenting books and friends with “good” kids encouraged punishment-based responses to episodes like the metal plane. But after trying that route, it just felt so wrong to me. Punishment failed to address the emotional component of such experiences, and it did nothing to equip my children with better options. And if I’m honest, it poured fuel on my own flare of anger. There’s something about adding power to anger that is bad for the human soul. To power up and issue anger-fueled punishment would not only erode trust, but it would dehumanize him. He was a little person with thoughts and feelings too. This was not what I wanted for this being who I adored, and it was not what I wanted for my relationship with him.

Beyond that, I saw that punishment might stop behavior, but it did nothing to quell their internal storms. I didn’t want to teach my kids to emotionally regulate by stuffing. When behavior gets harshly shut down, so too does so much else. Good behavior wasn’t the goal, but rather a healthy, balanced, and thoughtful little human being who experienced agency in his own life.

It wasn’t until we began raising puppies that much of this crystallized in my mind. When one of our puppies wrenched the drywall off of his confined space, I recognized that flare of anger in me. But there sat my happy, wagging puppy on a mountain of chewed up drywall, looking at me with adoration. It occurred to me that, like my children, he needed me to help identify what drove his behavior in the first place and assess my own role in the drywall debacle.