Dog and toddler troubles
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So to summarise, my advice would be : it is your and your child responsibility to change this situation. Teach him everyday what is appropriate to do with the dogs and give lots of praise when he does so. When he doesn't, you pick him up and move him to another room. Stay your ground and keep your boundaries. The most important is to always follow the same boundaries and always remove him from the situation when he doesn't do what is appropriate and acceptable. But do not have a big reaction. You just say something like "I won't let you treat the dogs this way so I'm removing you, we will try again later"
Love this! They are very much our babies and I don't want to cause them any unnecessary stress and I feel it's out of anxiety because they think he's distressed. We are definitely working with our toddler as the shouting is next level. We don't shout at the dogs so not a learned thing, it's purely because he gets a reaction, except unlike us who don't give him, the dogs can't help it. He's so gentle with them, we teach him soft hands and he's very much involved with them but it's so noisy 🤦🏽♀️
I definitely can understand why he would keep doing it, that's toddler behaviour 101, especially if he gets a reaction he thinks is funny! Our daughter also adores our cats, she's just always been a very active kid and that's too fast for our cats. The removing technique is from gentle parenting. It works for everything, it's just a matter of repetition, like everything in toddlerhood 😅
@Amandine thanks 😅
We have 4 cats (that we adopted before having a baby) and a 21 months old. It's obviously not the same type of issues but I'd say fur babies issues. I am an animal advocate so my take on this might be different to other people but I believe our house is as much our cats house as it ours. Plus they were here first. So to me, the issue lies with our child. She needs to learn to be gentle and slow. Which is very difficult for her being a toddler and all. So we're teaching her, every single day, repeat repeat repeat. And until she learns, she will be removed from the situation if she's not following the rules of how we treat the cats. But it is hers and our responsibility to make this happen, my cats should not have to be inflicted anything or their routine changed, because of her behaviour. They are the most chill fur babies, but obviously they're cats, so don't go poke and scream at them that's just unfair and not ok in our household. We value their peace as much as ours.