Lots of my customers seem to be starting families so I thought I would share some of my experiences of having babies/ young children with pets. In this post I will mostly discuss small animals.
Our babies were born into a home full of animals. However for the first few weeks of my babies lives I had all my animal looked after by others so I could get to grips with the baby without worrying that the animals would suffer. Within four weeks I had my brood back together, pets had had a nice holiday I had had time with the baby.
For the first few months nothing much changes but then the toddler emerges and is desperate to try everything.
At this point you have three options
1. re home pet ( which I don't particularly agree with unless the situation is desperate)
2. Try to keep the Toddler away as much as possible from the pet.
3. Start to slowly introduce toddler to pet and enjoy your pet together ( my preference)
If a parent likes pets usually the child will. If the parent doesn't like or is scared of pets then the child will be the same.
My advice is involve your toddler in the care of your pet ( under your supervision at all times). Everything will take longer but if you relax and start to involve the toddler you will all start to enjoy the experience.
My girls first started their career in animal care by filling the food bowl, they can do this from a very young age. Eventually I direct them to to feed "top draw orange bag etc". So by the time they are pre schoolers they knew their colors and felt quite important.
The next job is filling the water bottle. It will get filled infill, splashed about but who cares kids love water. My girls started filling bottles from a bucket, then they learnt how to use a tap. Now at 4 and a half my youngest can un screw a bottle fill it and put it back together and put the bottle on the hutch and run. She will also tell you the water will be yucky if left too long so we must do it every day.
My girls also love the dust pan an brush. They start very young using them as drum sticks. We then have hours of sweeping bedding over the pan and throwing it over the bin bag! But by 4 years old my girls are seasoned sweepers!!!
When they are ready they start to help me change the bedding. It is lovely to see them trying to arrange the clean bedding. Once they have finished all their jobs we give the pet a stroke. The girls are then very proud of the jobs they have done and slowly I am teaching them how to enjoy caring for their pets.
I always instill in my children we always wash our hands after caring for the pets and they must never deal with their pet alone.
I use caring for the pet as an activity, therefore I can never understand why people don't have time for their pets when they have a baby. Life for everyone changes when a baby comes, change is not always bad it's how you deal with it.
Hope you enjoyed this post
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