In this episode, I discuss a recent news story about an avoidable tragic accident. My goal in sharing occasional stories like this is to help parents prevent dog bites and other tragic incidents involving babies and children and dogs.
Resources
Here are some of my favorite management tools to keep dogs and babies safe and to prevent mistakes. If you use these links, I will earn a few pennies.
- Toddleroo Play Yard – Vertical Slats only – can lock angles and move the door
- Metal safety gate or playpen for toddler/dog with vertical slats only
- Evenflo Versatile Play Space for toddler/dog, Cool Gray
- Baby Gate – note – if you are using a baby gate at the top or bottom of a stairway, please use one that mounts with hardware instead of tension.
- Dog crate for safe sleep in the same room as the parents and infant. Only use if your dog is already comfortable in a crate.
If you’ve got a question about your kids and dogs, go to www.speakpipe.com/PoochParenting and record it there just like a voicemail. And I will include it in a future episode.
Transcript Highlights
Tragedy actually brings me here today to talk to all of you. So as you know, my professional specialty as a dog trainer is to help families who have children and dogs. And that arises from the fact that I’m a trained teacher. I am also a mother and I’m a certified professional dog trainer. So helping families with kids and dogs is what I am really passionate about. And that’s what I’ve chosen to specialize in with my business.
And so when I heard about a tragedy that happened over the weekend, I knew that I needed to come on and talk to all of you because there are a lot of misconceptions and there are a lot of thoughts and judgments that people make when they hear about something like this. And I want to talk to you about it from my perspective.
Summary of what happened: A family had a two month old baby who was sleeping next to the parents’ bed in a swing in the bedroom and the family’s German shepherd injured and ultimately killed the baby during the night.
I hope I don’t cry. Okay. The, they woke up when they heard a commotion, the mom called the police. The dad took the dog into the backyard and shot it. So this was a tragedy on a hundred different fronts, on a hundred different accounts. I feel horrible for the parents. They have had to endure a loss that’s unimaginable.
And I know that it’s really easy to judge. I think that it’s really common for people to judge and blame the parents. And it, this was an absolutely avoidable accident and avoidable tragedy, and it should not have happened and it could have been avoided, but here’s the thing. You don’t know what you don’t know. And you guys are connected to me or you wouldn’t be watching this video or you’re connected to someone who shares this video later. And so you are thoughtful and you’re proactive and you want to do better. And I give huge kudos to you for that.
But there are a lot of people who don’t know that help, like what I offer exists. And they just think that kids and dogs are fine. They’ve been fine for generations. Nothing’s going to happen. Or they think my dog was my first baby. My dog would never do anything. You know, my dog’s wonderful. My dogs, my love the dog is the love of my life and would never do anything to hurt me or my child or anybody who I care about.
And in fact, we were having a conversation in one in my Facebook group called Parenting kids and dogs. And, and somebody literally made a comment that said, your dog will pick up on the love you have for the baby and will therefore behave appropriately. So there’s a lot of misconceptions out there. That’s simply not true. Dogs are animals. They’re not mind readers. They’re not people. Dogs are animals and they have a lot of teeth. And if for some reason something happens, they will use those teeth. It is our job as adult responsible humans, as parents to prevent accidents like this from happening, it is absolutely our responsibility. It is not the dog’s responsibility to make this choice. It shouldn’t even be something that’s possible. Okay, this shouldn’t have even been possible, but I want to go back to the parents and what the parents are going through.
And I want to talk for a second about compassion. And I’m really, really sad that this happened and I’m furious that had happened, but I am not going to pile on guilt to these poor people. Even though it was avoidable, they were probably suffering from lack of sleep. It’s possible that a two month old baby was in a phase of its life, where it was colicky or had reflux and by sleeping in the swing, which I’m not going to say whether that’s safe or not.
I’m going to interview a sleep expert about the safety of that. So I’m going to leave that to the pros, but these parents were probably so desperate and so tired, unless you are a parent, you do not fully understand the actual pain that you can feel from being so overwhelmingly tired that you feel like you would do anything just to get a few hours of sleep. And it’s possible that they were feeling that and they were experiencing that. And that’s why the baby was in a swing. But the fact remains and something that we, we are not going to ignore or avoid is the fact that the dog should not have been loose in that room in the first place. So again, you’re all here because you care about this.
You want to do better. You want to be better. You want to avoid accidents like that. And I love you for that. We, we need to get the word out that support like this exists. Okay. I devote my time and energy and helping families avoid situations like this. I’ve got a membership which opens a couple of times a year and that’s ongoing support. It’s one part support group and constant support over the developmental changes of your child and your dog. And it’s one part dog training. Because again, there are constant changes that happen with your dog as you’re growing your family. So maybe your dog dashes through the door, maybe your dog now barks and interrupts nap time. Again, this goes back to sleep, right? We can’t have our dog driving us crazy. Maybe our dog embarrasses us in public. And we have all this guilt over the fact that we’re not Parenting our dog, the way that we used to.
So my membership, which you can get information at www. safekidsanddogs.com. You can get on the wait list. I highly recommend that as ongoing support. I want you guys to love each other. I want you to love living with your dog again, and that’s really hard to do without a parent coach on your shoulder. I mean, I’m right there. I’m there. I answer questions all the time. We are an amazing support group.
Let’s I want to address options for families with, in terms of sleep dog. There are people who I believe that because the dog has slept in their room up until the point when the baby’s about to be born, that the dog should remain in their bedroom. And if that’s the case and you really, really want your dog in your bedroom, I’m fine. Keep your dog in your bedroom. But then the baby cannot sleep in your bedroom. The baby needs to sleep in another room with the door closed, because if you are asleep, you’re not watching. You’re not supervising. Just being in the same room is not good enough.
And I tell you the number of times I’ve gotten phone calls and urgent emails from people saying, I wish I knew about you sooner, my dog bit, the baby. And I saw the whole thing happened. Now you couldn’t have seen the whole thing happened. If you’re in the other room, you were right there. You’ve watched it happen and it still happened, but it didn’t have to, right? So there’s a lot that it can be done. And for those of you that are proactive enough to be here before your baby’s even born, God, I’m so proud of you, but there’s a lot to be done. And you need a coach. You need a dog trainer to guide you.
So there’s a lot to be done. And there’s a lot more than just introducing your dog and baby when they come home from the hospital. And then, because that went well, then now you’re in the clear because that’s absolutely not the case. That’s not true. It’s not that simple. This is a daily, hourly, monthly, yearly commitment that you are making to your child and to your dog.
You’re telling your dog, I love you enough that I’m not going to let you make a mistake. That is life-threatening either to my child or to the dog itself. Okay? When a dog makes a mistake like a simple nip, getting into the garbage, eating something that it shouldn’t eat, these are potentially life-threatening events. Now, if the dog does something actually damaging to a human, there’s a very good chance that dog will be euthanized or turned into a shelter, which could result in any number of different things.
That’s what I want to help people do. And I’m going to do it with my whole heart. I’m going to help you. I’m not going to judge you. And I’m really frustrated that this happened to these parents.
We need to help people understand the stakes. I want this to be normal. Okay? You go get prenatal care. That’s normal. You get your teeth cleaned. That’s normal. You get your kids vaccinated. That’s normal. You take your puppy for a well puppy visit. That’s normal. Well, you even sign your kid up for swim lessons because you want to make sure that they don’t drown. That’s normal, but what should also be normal is working with somebody like me, because if I can prevent literally a life and death situation, wouldn’t it be worth an $85 consult. Yeah, I think so. It’s a lot cheaper than an ER visit.
And I can do a lot in an hour with you and I can do a lot more in my membership. I can do so much more in my membership. You’ll have a dog you love living with again.
I think that every OB GYN and every pediatrician should give out information about how to read body language, how to keep your kids safe at the very least to give a recommendation for some pens and Gates, which I have. I have free recommendations for all that stuff. I have printable guides that I can give you guys these, those are band-aid solutions. There’s a lot more to parenting kids in dogs and keeping babies safe and baby Gates. But I’m telling you, those are absolute life savers because you have to be able to pee. You have to be able to make dinner. You have to be able to deal with the mountain of laundry. That’s going to happen when you’re the parent of kids and dogs and you can’t have your eyes on everybody a hundred percent of the time. It’s absolutely impossible. So what are you going to do about it? Right? So again, working with somebody like me can help you come up with a plan so that you can literally just get through the day. I can give you a ton of ideas about where a dog should sleep, how you should get them used to it when you should start that routine.
If your dog is crate trained, your dog can sleep in your bedroom. Absolutely. As long as they don’t typically try to break out of your crate, right? But having doors and barriers in place is crucial to keeping everybody safe. And I don’t want to see accidents like this keep happening over and over again. These poor parents were probably sleep deprived. They were tired. And the ultimate tragedy happened because they were not supervising.
I don’t know anything about this dog. They, the article said that the dog had been well-trained and had never had a problem in the past. So you need to understand that dogs often are triggered by things that we may or may not understand. I don’t know if the swing was in motion or if the swing was still, I don’t know if the baby startled during sleep as young babies do, but all of those kinds of quick motions can trigger the prey, predator, prey, instinct in dogs. I don’t know that that’s what happened there. I don’t know because I wasn’t there and I’m not going to offer too much conjecture, except that we should probably use this as a cautionary tale, that they had no reason to suspect something bad would happen. And it did. And they paid the ultimate price. They lost the two loves of their lives because they took a chance and it’s not worth taking a chance. And so I think it’s our responsibility to let people know that help exists and that people should get it while they’re pregnant or in the process of adopting a baby before the baby even gets home.
I don’t want you to think it’s a lost cause. It’s absolutely not, but you can be very intentional and get to work on training immediately because this is a life and death issue. So I’m sorry to talk about something so sad and so tragic, but there are no excuses. Ignorance can get you so far, but you need to do better. If you’re going to raise a human and grow it up into a successful adult, you have to do better. And I would be happy to help you.
Want more support?
If you’re looking for ongoing support for your family with dogs, be sure to get on the waiting list for my Thriving Parents of Kids and Dogs Membership.
If you enjoy these episodes or feel like they have made your family safer and less chaotic, feel free to buy me a coffee as a way of saying “Thanks!”
