Sunday
Sep162018
1 Day Short of 6 Weeks
Sunday, September 16, 2018 at 7:22PM 
I am told the dogs had a full day. Tomorrow they turn 6 weeks old. We are rather tired so it is a very short blog. Our son Jon turned on the law mower out back and they went running to hide in all directions. I ignored them. They came back out even though it was still running and ignored the noise. If you pick them up and coddle them you validate the reaction. So you ignore and they build their coping skills. They recovered quite fast as you will see on one of the videos.
Reader Comments (2)
Just watched the lawn mower video, funny to see them hide for cover but quickly came back out. Well done little ones! I got caught up on other videos as well, those pups are so delicious :-)
I posted that on purpose so they get that the wrong thing to do is run to pick them up and say poor you. It is human nature to try to make it all go away but in reality we make deep seated fears when we run attempt to take their fear away. If we simply just ignore and not react they are able to create their own set of coping skills. They quickly get that there are nothing to be concerned about as you can see in the video.
We have dogs that come to visit that are afraid of thunder. Their parents warn us. They react at first. The others ignore them. They stop reacting as much. They do feed off of our anticipation and our reactions. It is so important not to coddle. Unfortunately some of us have already set the stage and therefore their reactions have been validated. It is more difficult to minimize a fear that is solidly there but you can minimize it. We have seen it when dogs stay here and we have storms over and over again. When we have storms here I sit out with the dogs, use my ipad and just enjoy the storm. I will be doing that again with the puppies if we get a thunderstorm or two. These pups reacted, ran to hide then came out. This was an important way to build coping skills and also realize noises are just noises that can be irritating but nothing to fear.