Being Resilient: Lessons from Puppy Parenting

We bring home a new puppy and quickly realize our biggest problem is not Alfie, it is how much we are trying to manage and control every moment. We connect puppy behavior struggles to helicopter parenting and resilience, then decide to give him more space to learn how to self-soothe and trust. 
• adopting Alfie and adjusting to his unknown early experiences 
• how being home constantly fuels whining, barking, and evening chaos 
• noticing our rigid schedule and stress are making things worse 
• the curling metaphor for “sweeping” discomfort away 
• why self-soothing and resilience require room to struggle safely 
• recommitting to leaving him alone sometimes and loosening control 

Transcript

Welcome And A New Lesson

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So I was pondering what I wanted to talk about for this week, and the lesson came to me about two hours ago.

Meet Alfie And The Struggle

Mary 0:15

So if you have been listening recently, you know that my husband and I adopted a puppy. His name is Alfie. And we have really been struggling. Um, when we got him, he was about 12 weeks old. So we've had him for two weeks, and we didn't know a lot about what his life was like before we got him, except he was a part of a litter of five, and he was being raised by a foster, a foster mom who has older dogs. She told me that there was interaction with other people, with children as young as two years old. Those are all good signs. She also said he it was indicated that he had experience with cats, but when I actually ask about it, that is not true. So that's been an adjustment because we have three cats. But I think because I have flexibility because I'm self-employed, my husband recently retired and is now has a consulting business. So we're both pretty busy, but we're busy based on how we want to manage our time.

Doing Too Much Creates Behavior Issues

Mary 1:31

So what has been happening, and it really, we've really only realized it today, is that we're having behavioral issues with our puppy because we're doing too much. We're here all the time. Even when he's napping, we stay out of sight of him, but one of us is always here. In two weeks, we haven't left together. We haven't left the house together and left him alone. He is crate trained already. He does really well in his crate. But I think we had this idea that we had to manage a schedule every day. And so when he was, you know, overtired, anybody that's raised a puppy knows or raised a human. When they're overtired, they're nearly unmanageable. And I think what happens with Alfie in the evening is he wants to chew on my pants and my shirt and my sandals and all of the things. And so I had to take a step back because we've both been so frustrated to be here for two weeks and really abandon a schedule and not really be able to meet our own needs in the sense of having time alone or keeping up with our exercise. So I think my realization was we are coddling him too much. And so what is happening is that he's not able to develop his own way to soothe himself. And I, as I realized it, and we sort of processed it and talked about it

Helicopter Parenting And The Curling Metaphor

Mary 3:16

and started to make some mental adjustments going forward, what we're going to do from this point on, I had to laugh because I have worked nearly my entire career with this type of issue, with parenting of humans and talking with parents, especially when I worked at the high school level, you know, the idea of helicopter parents, the parents that wanted to do too much. And I sort of liken this to if you know what curling is in the Olympics, it's the ice event where somebody has a stone and there's people in front of it, and the stone is like the big round thing that they're trying to get down the ice. And the people in front of it have these broom things, and they're smoothing the ice to get it to go farther. And I feel like that's sometimes what we do when we care about someone is we want to smooth everything and be there all the time and prevent angst. And so in the case of us right now, it's preventing the angst of Alfie whining and crying and missing us. But by always being there, I mean, we don't always, we're out of his sight, but he always knows we're in the house. We we live in an older house. You can't walk anywhere without the floors creaking. So he always has a sense that we're there. And even at night, when I get up to go pee, he barks till I come back, which is crazy.

Building Trust Through Space

Mary 4:42

It doesn't matter how quiet I am, what time of night it is. So this is not serving him because it's not allowing him to develop his own method of calming down, of knowing that we're coming back, of developing trust because we're always there. So, in the same way, we might do that with a human, we need to allow, especially our kids, to know that we can give them a little bit of a leash, right? Lengthen the leash, let them make their own choices. Certainly you have a safety net, but if you always keep them tethered to you, or you want to do the things for them so they don't ever fail, they're not developing resilience. They're not developing a sense of trusting themselves, of knowing, okay, mom, dad, whomever, whomever the support is, that person is there for me if I need them, but they're trusting me to figure it out. Even if there's crying, even if it's really difficult and there are, you know, speed bumps or, you know, a lot of things to navigate and even talk about nature. You know, trees don't grow strong until they have some wind that buffets them. It makes their roots grow, you know, deeper into the soil to anchor them. So all of this to say, I was doing the exact thing with a little puppy that I have talked with people about for decades, you know, as far as not doing that with humans, whether, again, it's your kids or it's a friend you care about. Sometimes when we love, we don't want to see that person in pain or we don't want them to repeat the mistakes that we made. But sometimes you really need to let people have some stumbles and have some heartache because we don't grow and change and develop resilience unless we do. So we have recommitted to abandoning having a rigid schedule, abandoning being here for him all the time,

Recommitting To New Boundaries

Mary 7:02

him being Alfie the puppy. Um, it's hard. It's really hard because we're never really sure what to do next, but we keep trying and we are partners in it, which makes it a lot easier.

Ask Listeners For Puppy Advice

Mary 7:14

So if you have any words of wisdom for new puppy owners, please feel free. You can text me. There's a link in the show notes. You can do a verbal text or you can just traditional text me. I would love that. Um, just to know from somebody else, you know, that it gets better, that encouragement is helpful. We love him so much. He is the sweetest boy, he's very smart, but it's very frustrating because we've we've lost all the things that make our lives our lives right now. But again, the irony is we've created it. We've created more of a weight, you know, because we're not trusting him to learn to navigate the world on his own with our guidance. So those are my thoughts for this

Closing Thoughts On Resilience

Mary 8:02

week. Until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.