Inside: The Lifelong Benefits of Growing Up with a Pet. Collaborative post.
We all know how precious it can be to share a home with a pet. Many of our most treasured memories involve the love of a little furry friend – and if yours don’t, you’re in the minority, with more than half of us welcoming a special little guy into our homes.
You’re reading this because the topic of pets has come up in your own home recently, in the predictable form of your young children begging incessantly for a cat, dog, reptile, or some other form of exotic creature you’ll undoubtedly be somewhat burdened with caring for. You’ve likely also run out of excuses to tell them in order to avoid such an eventuality. Luckily, your kids having a pet is actually a good thing – for more reasons than one.
1. Emotional and Psychological Benefits
The most obvious reason to get pets for your household would be to quell the volume of agitated requests from your kids – but the psychological benefits of pet ownership extend far beyond soothing your own parenting-related headaches.
Indeed, having a pet to look after can be incredible for your kids on an emotional level – enabling them to experience companionship, yes, but also through helping them regulate difficult emotions and feelings of anxiety. Whether through the simple act of play, or as a calming, unconditionally-loving presence in times of strife, a pet can be a fantastic route to better mental health outcomes for your kids.
2. Social Skills and Responsibility
As you likely know all too well, owning a pet isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. A bare foot discovering some freshly-laid hairballs; the sound of claws playfully shredding your expensive furnishings; a late-night dash to the emergency vets, only to pay for an incredibly expensive midnight burping session. These challenges in no weigh outweigh the emotional benefits of owning a pet – but they also don’t all need to be your responsibility if its your children asking…
In fact, the responsibility of caring for a pet can be the perfect vehicle for inculcating responsibility, patience, and nurturing skills in your kids. Leaving things like feeding time, the ordering of diet-relevant raw dog food, walkies schedules, litter cleaning and other essentials to your kids helps them understand the nature of responsibility – and carrying them out can also help with improving social interactions and communication, both within the family and with peers.
Giving kids a hand in picking the family pet can be part of that learning too. If a dog is on the cards, you can shop HonestPet with them, browsing breeds together to teach research and thoughtful choice-making.
3. Physical Health and Active Lifestyles
In fact, the walkies, playtime and general activity around pet ownership can also be incredible opportunities for your children to get ‘out there’ more – with significant benefits for physical health and fitness. Regular walkies with a dog make for more cardiovascular exercise each week, without even counting the exercise undertaken by successive rounds of ‘fetch’, ‘frisbee’ and ‘what’s that in your mouth, no drop it Fido please drop it come back’.
Exercise and outdoorsiness are compelling reasons to get a pet for your children by themselves, but round out a holistic collection of excellent reasons besides!