Like Teen, Like Dog
A tale of two kids, two dogs and one important parenting lesson.
Poet melted in Mia’s arms like French Silk Pie on Fourth of July. His limp body gave into his immediate trust in her touch. A week’s worth of stress from being impounded seemed to escape like air from a deflating balloon. In those moments of vulnerability, he and Mia forged a bond – one that excluded the rest of us. So much for the rainbows and butterflies I envisioned for our first dog-fostering experience.
Big Margo changed that course. As foster dog two, she was seventy pounds of wooly mammoth minus the tusks. She pranced across our threshold, wiggling her hips and fanning her ostrich-feather tail as she danced among our family. When she spied the toy box, she emptied it like a terrier rooting for a rabbit.
Poet, who’d been resting on Mia’s lap in observance, ran across Anna’s and my legs to better catapult off the sectional onto the billowing black cloud. Margo shook her head mightily, more to engage Poet than to dislodge him from her fur. Margo’s free-love soul was the yin to Poet’s reactive yang.
And therein lies the contradiction. As tightly bound as Poet was to Mia and her to him, Mia was a better match for laid back Margo and her love of all things human. Mia could work a room like a seasoned salesperson, asking teachers about their days and chatting up the parents who came to school to pick up their kids.
Anna was sharp-brained and attentive like Poet. She could read a room like an editor examines a manuscript with attention to details the rest of us missed. Anna and Poet could have herded a flock of sheep through a river of wolves with all the lambs and elderly accounted for on the other side.
After foster dogs one and two found their forever homes (Ok, I’ll admit, we failed at fostering and adopted Poet and Margo as resident pets!), our home became a revolving door of rescued canines with personalities and needs that were at once the same and often different. They all needed food, shelter, exercise, and fun. Consistency was the on-ramp to trust. But how long it took to earn it was often a product of the situation from which they came. Many had been abandoned. Some had been abused. Others were surrendered when their families exhausted their resources for care.
Our constant efforts to create a plan, adjust our actions, and shift our perspectives enhanced our abilities to be nimble. My perch as overseer of all things foster afforded me the opportunity to embrace the importance of individual needs within a dynamic system. Fostering helped improve my parenting. I became more able to see my kids for who they were and what they needed to thrive and to trust.
Struggling with your teens? I suggest you try fostering dogs! That is, if you have the emotional bandwidth and time. Otherwise, there’s an abundance of help for parents navigating the adolescent years. Think books, blogs, magazines, posts and podcasts. Also consider a parenting coach.
Many of today’s experts suggest a “parent first” mentality—which is no different than the “fasten your oxygen mask before helping others” metaphor.
Josh Shipp, author of the 2017 tome The Grown-Up’s Guide to Teenage Humans, believes that parents of teens need to shift from being an air traffic controller and overseer of all things safety and growth to being a coach. Not an in-your-face, win-at-all-costs coach, but one who fosters character development, provides opportunity to practice real-life situations, and has “the back” of their kid. It requires an adult to acquire new skills and thought patterns and to abandon the role they perfected for more than a decade as a parent to a youngster.
Shipp’s idea of parent as coach has inspired a host of new professionals who are not unlike dog and cat behaviorists. They listen to your struggles, take notes on your home dynamics, then offer tailored interventions focused on your family’s needs.
My friend, Diane Rose-Solomon of What’s Plant-Based Cooking Good Looking and Animal Magic Films, introduced me to Impact Parents, an online resource to help parents help kids through training, coaching, and support. They specialize in the needs of complex kids and focus on a “coach approach to parenting.”
I recently received a newsletter from Cooper, another online parenting support and coaching platform. The narrative in the post was all about helping parents help their kids by first addressing the anxieties a parent brings to parenting.
Podcasts and posts are low-risk avenues to help reframe what it means to parents teens in today’s cell phone-centered world. I’ve found many parenting resources on Substack – the social media platform for writers of all types of writing. Some of my go-to writers and podcasters are Amber Groomes, Ph.D., Dr. Aliza Pressman, Kathryn Barbash, and Kate Lynch.
The new bestseller by Lisa Damour Ph.D., The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents is not a coaching platform but another comprehensive guide to teenage behavior. If you are a library book reader like me, you will be in a long que for this book. While waiting, check out Damour’s other books such as Untangled and Under Pressure and her new digital subscription library of videos and articles for parents, caregivers and teens, Untangling 10 to 20.
Don’t forget the four-legged creatures who inhabit your home and your heart. Think deeply about the strategies you employ to create connections with your pets. How do they interact with others in your home? How are they similar to your kids? How do they differ in their needs and wants? If you are like me, you will learn a great deal on how to parent your teens and reparent yourself by observing your dogs and cats.
As I mentioned above and in previous posts, fostering dogs while raising our teens provided us with impactful parenting insights. If you are interested in fostering, ask me how! I’d love to help.
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I've always always always had dogs, and the more time I spend with dogs, the more I learn that they are little love mirrors. How I love them and how they love me is a direct representation of how I love myself.
I love how you show each of your kids personalities through the lens of their dog personas. thank you for that beauty.
also...some time ago when I was a swim coach for teenage-humans, I read a blog post from a father saying that parenting a teen is like being the walls of a swimming pool. You have to be there to contain the waters of their emotions, as they explore their ability to swim in the deep ends of life. You can't reach for them, they have to come to you, and when they do, they hang on for a bit, and then KICK off you to go back into the waters. I wish I could find that article again. It was absolutely brilliant, and so accurate.
We foster dogs as well and I have never looked at it through the parenting lens. Amazing! Thank you so much for sharing your insights (and home to many wonderful doggers!)