Puppies are babies

Don’t expect too much too soon with your puppies.

Willow is 16 months old now, she’s technically an adult dog. Yet, mentally she is still very much a puppy. She does cheeky things, she has zoomies around the house with her toys, she’s super playful and curious of everything, she snuggles up to me and the other dogs when she goes to sleep, and she gets agitated when she’s tired.

A year old is not an adult. Sixteen months is not an adult. For some dogs, two or three years old is still not an adult. They grow up and mature at different paces, and so it is unfair for us to put milestones on our dogs.

Willow wasn’t toilet trained reliably until she was about 12 months old. For all her intelligence and workiness, she’s a slow-maturer. She still looks and acts like a puppy, and that’s okay.

People used to see children as small adults, able to do full days of work and take on extreme responsibilities, but now we understand that there are lots of life stages between infancy and adulthood. Even personally, I can look back on myself five years ago, when I was just 20, and I am physically and mentally a totally different person. Just because I was technically an adult, doesn’t mean I was fully mature.

Yet with dogs, we seem to think that once they’re fully grown and have hit a year old, they’re fully cooked. We expect them to behave like adults, make mature decisions and our leniency dissipates.

This 16 month old is a puppy. Look at her and tell me this isn’t a puppy, who has just had a mad zoomie session and has fallen asleep on my lap with a toy still in her mouth. She’s a baby, so instead of having high expectations and holding her to a standard she’s not mentally capable of, I will let her navigate life at her own pace.

Give your dogs time to grow up, and don’t force it. Puppies do puppy things, that’s okay.