Most of the advice about dogs and new babies concentrates on the doorstep – how to carry the baby in, whether to let the dog sniff the blanket, who holds what.
That moment matters far less than people think. What matters is the six months before it, because by the time you walk through the door with a car seat, the dog has either been prepared or he hasn’t, and there’s very little you can do about it that afternoon.
Everything changes at once
Think about what the arrival of a baby actually does to a dog’s world.
The routine goes first. Walks move, get shorter, or get skipped. Meals drift. The person who was home all day is suddenly occupied, or the person who was out all day is suddenly home. Nothing happens when it used to.
The house changes physically. Furniture moves to make room. There’s a cot, a pram in the hall, a bouncer where his bed was. Rooms he’s always had access to are suddenly shut.
Then there’s the sensory side. New smells – nappies, creams, sterilising fluid, milk. New sounds, and a newborn’s cry is genuinely piercing at a frequency dogs find hard to ignore. Visitors, constantly, at odd hours.
And the attention drops off a cliff, usually right at the point where the dog is most confused about everything else.
Any one of those is manageable. All of them in the same week, arriving alongside a small unpredictable creature that everybody is fussing over, is a great deal to ask. That’s why the work happens in advance – front-loading the changes so they’re not associated with the baby, keeping his sleep and routine as intact as you can manage, and where a dog is genuinely anxious, using daily Anxiety Relief for Dogs through the transition rather than starting once things have already gone wrong.
Start now, not in the last fortnight
The principle behind almost everything below: every change you make should happen weeks or months before the baby arrives, so the dog associates it with nothing in particular rather than with the baby.
Make a list of everything that will be different. Where he sleeps. Which rooms he can enter. Whether he’s allowed on the sofa. Who walks him and when. Whether he’ll be fed earlier. Whether he’ll be crated at any point.
Then implement it all now, one item at a time, with a couple of weeks between each. A dog who was moved off the bed in March has forgotten about it by September. A dog who was moved off the bed the day the baby came home has drawn a conclusion.
The same goes for reducing attention. If he currently gets a fuss every time he nudges your hand, start weaning that down gently now, and start rewarding him for settling nearby instead of for demanding.
Sounds
Baby cries, and particularly the newborn cry, are worth desensitising in exactly the way you’d handle fireworks.
Find recordings – there are plenty free online – and play them at a volume so low the dog barely registers. Feed him, or do something he enjoys, while they play. Two or three minutes, then off.
Creep the volume up over several weeks. He should never react. If he lifts his head and stares at the speaker, you’ve gone too loud.
Do the same with the other noises: a musical mobile, a baby monitor, a vibrating bouncer, the specific squeak of the pram wheels. Novelty is what unsettles dogs, and by the time the baby arrives none of it should be novel.
The nursery and the kit
Decide the nursery rule now and stick to it from the day the room is set up. Whichever you choose – never allowed, or allowed by invitation only – apply it consistently for months beforehand. A baby gate on the doorway is more useful than a closed door, because he can still see and hear rather than being shut out of something mysterious.
Get the equipment out early. Assemble the cot, put the pram in the hall, set up the bouncer, and let him investigate all of it while it’s empty and boring. Leave it there. A pram that appears in the hallway on the same day as a baby is a strange object connected to a strange event; one that’s been in the way since June is furniture.
Start using the creams and lotions on yourself. Wash a muslin in the baby detergent. Let the smells arrive gradually.
Practise the new routine
Walking with a pram takes practice, and doing it for the first time with a newborn in it is not the moment to discover your dog pulls.
Borrow one, or use yours empty, and do the walk properly – lead in one hand, pram in the other, on the routes you’ll actually use. Work out whether you need a different harness or a shorter lead. Some people use a lead attachment on the pram frame; plenty of trainers dislike them because you can’t let go in an emergency.
Practise the one-handed things too. Feeding him while holding something bulky. Getting through the front door with your hands full. Putting his lead on while sitting down.
And be realistic about walks. If his current hour is going to become twenty minutes for a while, start building in scent work and chews at home now, so the enrichment is already established when the walk shrinks.
The training that matters
You don’t need much, and what you need is unglamorous.
Settle on a mat. The single most useful thing. He learns to lie on a designated bed and stay there while things happen around him. Build it slowly with food, in short sessions, until he’ll do twenty minutes.
Four on the floor. No jumping up at people, especially people holding something. Reward him for keeping his feet down rather than telling him off for putting them up.
Leave it, and a solid recall in the house. For the inevitable dropped dummy, muslin or biscuit.
Being alone happily, if he isn’t already. There will be hospital trips and days when nobody can supervise, and a dog who panics when left will make a hard fortnight considerably harder.
Coming home
Keep it low-key. If he hasn’t seen you for a day or two he’ll be excited, so let someone take him for a decent walk beforehand, and let him greet you without the baby in your arms first. Get the greeting over with, then bring the baby in.
Don’t force an introduction. Don’t hold the baby down at dog height for a sniff – a common piece of advice and a genuinely bad one. Let him approach in his own time, from a distance, and let him look. Sitting on the sofa with the baby while the dog is on the floor nearby is plenty for the first day.
The blanket trick – sending a used blanket home ahead of you – does no harm, but the smell isn’t the difficult part. The disruption is.
Get the attention timing right
This is the counterintuitive bit and it’s the one that makes the biggest long-term difference.
The instinct is to give the dog attention when the baby is asleep, because that’s when you have a free hand. What that teaches him, over a few months, is that good things happen when the baby is absent – which is precisely the association you don’t want.
Flip it. Feed him treats while you’re feeding the baby. Talk to him while the baby is on your lap. Give him his chew when the baby is in the room. Let the baby’s presence predict the good stuff.
It feels awkward and it’s worth the effort. You’re building a dog who’s pleased to see the baby rather than one who’s waiting for it to go away.
Safety, plainly
Most bites to young children come from the family’s own dog, in the family home, from a dog with no history of aggression. That isn’t a reason to panic and it is a reason to be straightforward about rules.
Never leave them alone together. Not for a minute, not while you answer the door, not while the dog is asleep and the baby is in a bouncer. Supervision means an adult in the room, awake, watching – not in the room on their phone.
Use physical barriers rather than relying on vigilance. Baby gates, a playpen, a crate the dog genuinely likes. It’s much easier to maintain a rule than to be alert every second for two years.
Feed the dog somewhere the baby will never be. Pick up chews and bones when the baby is out of the cot. Most incidents involving small children happen around food, bones, beds and sleeping dogs.
And never let a child approach a dog who’s on his bed. That bed is his; the whole point of it is that it’s a place nobody bothers him.
The stage people don’t plan for
Newborns are the easy part. The dog can largely ignore something that doesn’t move.
The difficulty starts at around six months and peaks with crawling and early walking. Now there’s a small person moving unpredictably at the dog’s eye level, grabbing fur, falling onto him, cornering him behind the sofa. This is where the incidents happen, and it arrives at exactly the point most owners have relaxed.
Plan for it before it comes. Make sure the dog has an escape route from every room and somewhere he can go that the child cannot follow. Keep the gates up. Start teaching the child, as early as they can understand, to leave the dog alone when he’s lying down.
Signs he’s struggling
Watch for lip licking, yawning, turning away, whale eye – that crescent of white when he looks sideways rather than turning his head. Leaving the room when the baby cries. Refusing food he’d normally take. Sleeping somewhere new. Suddenly clingy, or suddenly distant.
Growling is information, not disobedience. A dog who growls is telling you he’s uncomfortable and asking for space. Punish it and you may get a dog who stops warning, which is far more dangerous. Thank him, move the child, and work out what needs to change.
When to get help
Any growling, stiffening, snapping or fixed staring around the baby warrants a qualified behaviourist promptly, not in a few months. So does a dog who’s stopped eating, or whose behaviour has changed markedly since the baby arrived.
Speak to your vet too, particularly for an older dog. A dog in pain has much less patience for being climbed on, and arthritis is under-diagnosed in exactly the dogs who now have a toddler using them as furniture.
