Training For The Ages: Learning and Development Stages

By Dean Miller, Club Canine, ClubCanineHouston.com

In weekly conversations with clients, it’s interesting to hear their list of things that their new puppy learned like high five, shake, roll over. Or “He already knows the basics, sit and stay, and he’s only 12 or 15 weeks old.” While these are important concepts, they are just that. And are they actually the most important concepts at this age? What typically follows is how the puppy is driving them crazy with a host of other unworkable behaviors and conduct because they had blind spots, either letting the puppy just “be a puppy” or teaching concepts/exercises with no clear order and or not the real priority.

At 8-12 weeks, I’m highly focused on teaching concepts on how to learn. It builds a positive attitude and is essential in setting the tone for a lifelong desire to learn. As well, it teaches the pup the crucial practice and desire to prioritize and make effort. Molding and shaping this attitude allows you to begin teaching the pup important relationship boundaries. This is important for keeping your relationship out of conflict from confusing or mixed messages. Social interactions are often emphasized at this age yet highly misunderstood. If you can’t predict the safety and positive outcome of any social situation and it goes poorly or sends the wrong message, you’re doing more harm than good for the puppy. Knowing dog behavior and what you are watching is important to what’s being learned.

The continued practice of learning to learn never really ends. We look to build proficiency through continued effort and guidance, creating life habits. Adding challenges to the game is essential as the puppy continues to demonstrate a good attitude and an understanding of what they’re doing. If the game loses its challenge, they won’t want to play anymore.

The shift from want to over to have to is highly dependent on how you’ve built and completed your early work. Usually, puppies are making a transition to a little more independent thought from 4-6 months. They are by no means adolescents but can start to test boundaries and expectations more. Part of this is biological while the other is highly influenced by the dog owners consistency and clarity in communication and expectations. If we’re staying the course in our leadership, we can easily create expectations and a desire to "want to" in the pups head. This is predicated on the idea that they’re winning, on your terms. Adding rules and responsibilities is highly dependent on the individual pup. There is no specific age, it’s a developmental assessment that gets made just knowing and understanding dogs...when to push and when to pull back.

As the pups move through that period from 6-10 months, we’re really seeing growth and more maturity. We’re adding adequate challenge and distraction to our basics. They’re not babies anymore and usually near that 10 month mark, you will start to see some tween demeanor arise. Here’s where the rubber meets the road. If you’ve done your work correctly, that puppy is going to have a much smoother ride (as well as you) through adolescence. And if you missed steps, taught them out of order, allowed the pup to be wild and or avoided issues, they will rear their ugly heads in full force and life will become a bit of a struggle. If you didn’t properly prepare the pup, you now don’t have the tools needed to deal with whatever breakdowns start to show up.

From 12-18 months, adding responsibility to actions and decisions is in full swing. If we’re still not expecting enough from the young dog, we’re more likely to see behavior issues grow. The adolescent dog's brain is spinning like an Olympic figure skater going for gold. With adequate stimulation and challenge, we’ll keep them steady and confident. We continue to review the things they learned when they just started out as well as new challenges. This doesn’t mean they will be mistake-free in the things they learned when they were 6 months, and it’s our responsibility to hold them accountable for effort and accuracy. You are, after all, looking at the big picture of how you want your adult dog to behave, right?

Mental maturity can be a bit breed dependent but in general, it’s about 3 yrs. of age for most. Dogs between 2 -3 are definitely still learning and maturing but they also have a great foundation underneath them now if we did our basics correctly. We taught and reviewed in a progression that makes sense, consistently over the last 2 yrs. And if we run into training challenges or problems, we have the tools instilled to be able to correct things more easily. If basics were poor or incomplete, then we can’t effectively right the ship.

By: Alexandra Malone, CPDT-KA, CSAT, FDM, EFFCP, Owner

The Yin Yang Dog, TheYinYangDog.com