How a Parenting Book Reminded Me That I Already Know How to Get My Dog to Stop Stealing Food from the Table
I first listened to the Hunt, Gather, Parent audiobook (read by the author, Michaeleen Doucleff) when my daughter was an itty baby and absolutely loved it. Doucleff took her feisty young child along on her stays with Maya, Inuit, and Hadzabe communities to learn from their time-honored parenting techniques, and the resulting book is chock-full of stories and action-oriented ideas that I think about all the time. It helped to radically reshape my approach to parenting our teenaged foster son–another story for another day. But now that my baby is a full-fledged toddler, I wanted to listen again to bolster my attempts to be patient with her as we slowly invite her to help with, say, loading her spoon in the dishwasher or putting her stinky socks in her laundry bag.
This reread of Doucleff’s book has shored up my intentions to invite our daughter into real, helpful work. But it also gave me some painfully glaring insights into the escalating transgressions of our worst-behaved family member: the dog.
Since my partner and I became parents a couple of years ago, our already sassy Panda has grown bolder about things she knows are wrong, like stealing human food and sauntering out open doors. We invested a lot of time into training her when she was a puppy, and she has some good foundational skills, but we’ve gotten lax about reinforcing them. Last week, we found her on top of the dinner table sniffing around for scraps. Twice. We’ve all, from the toddler up, gotten very shouty and self-righteous with her about trying to steal our food, to no avail.
In this reread of Hunt, Gather, Parent, two things stood out that made me cringe at our dinnertime yell-at-the-dog routine:
Doucleff’s observes that middle class parenting involves a LOT of talking, and that all of that talking probably contributes to the high levels of conflict between parents and children because of the way that it invites negotiation and debate. Modeling and physically communicating about the behavior you want to see is often more effective.
High energy, dysregulated emotional responses to undesirable behaviors often just inject more bad energy into high-stress situations. Keeping control of your emotions and being non-reactive should be the parenting baseline. They emphasized the importance of staying emotionally steady in our foster parent training, too, and we’ve grown a lot in this as a family. Except not so much with the dog.
If these things are true for human children, which I think they are, then it seems even more far-fetched that talking at the dog, especially when we’re frustrated, will ever get her to stop sneaking bites of tortilla from the toddler. And our angry energy only seems to invigorate her.
I’ve so far spent two meals working on reestablishing the “go-to-bed” command, where the dog is supposed to go to her bed and wait to be released from when the toddler gets in her chair until she gets down. I got up at least a dozen times–silently and calmly–to direct her back to her bed. And then there have also been a couple of meals when I was tired and just didn’t want to get up twenty times…and that’s how we got here in the first place, I’m sure. So we humans are the work in progress at this point.
It’s beautiful and humbling to be reminded of my creaturely similarities to my pup–thank you, Michaeleen Doucleff, for that. Maybe that compassion can help me sustain the will to retrain Panda.
