When Wendy Lyons Sunshine got her first puppy—abandoned behind a gas station, struggling with worms and anemia—she was in over her head. As puppy training guides failed to help her with the out-of-control, traumatized bundle of teeth and claws rescue pup, she turned to her work helping world-class child development experts. Could strategies for raising happy, well-adjusted kids transfer to a puppy?
As it turns out, yes, they can! From the first try, parenting wisdom transformed Sunshine’s relationship with her challenging little one. Soon enough, Sunshine’s view of her puppy shifted from one of adversity to one of compassion and understanding, and she was able to bring patience and therapeutic concepts to meet her dog’s needs. When Sunshine reached out to experts, they affirmed that science-based principles used with at-risk children align well with best practices of holistic, positive, and progressive dog handling. Exploring parallels between human and canine research, attachment styles, history of trauma, parenting styles, and her own “inner child” proved a mindful path for pet parenting.
Far from a standard dog training manual, Tender Paws explicitly applies parenting wisdom and best practices used with special needs kids to a cross-section of scenarios, from recognizing developmental trauma and unmet core needs, to making decisions about appropriate equipment, to responding to difficult behavior, to understanding the parenting style from which we approach our dogs.
Sunshine empowers you and your dog by offering:
• A synthesis of the fields of child development, attachment, trauma, sensory integration, neurobiology, learning, animal behavior, and ethology.
• A problem-solving framework that makes dog training decisions clearer and behavior frustrations easier to resolve.
• Parenting wisdom to help your dog move beyond trauma and into wellness.
Borrowing the principles of parenting for dogs feels obvious to some people: instinctive and ordinary and inevitable. But that’s not true for everyone, especially those of us who had a less than ideal childhood and bear the scars of early harm, loss, trauma, or deprivation. Tender Paws provides an interdisciplinary, comprehensive, evidence-based guide for readers who want to honor the needs of—and improve outcomes for—puppies and dogs they care about.
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Should be required reading
This is one of favourite books because it gives you an easy to understand framework for improving your dog’s quality of life. It discusses health, enrichment, environment, relationships and teaching/training. It helps you understand that each impacts the other and we need to look at the whole, rather than just one part (a lot of us just get stuck on training, training, training). I think, when you keep all of these aspects in mind, it helps you appreciate your dog for his doggy-ness and give him grace. A lot of new books, thankfully, are also written with the same respect for dogs and who they are, but, they lack an easy to understand framework that you can use as a starting point. That is why I highly recommend this book and think that everyone should read it. Afterwards, you can look up books on specifics like, dog body language, enrichment ideas, health books, etc. Thank you for reading my review.
