I have a 4.5 month old GSD. And we just had our first kid today. Mom and baby won't be home for a few days at least.

Does anyone have any suggestions for handling pups around babies and vice versa? I want the dog to know the baby is off limits, but also not to resent the baby.

Have you read Ed's Dog Training eBooks? There is an excellent one concerning dogs and kids.

Resent is really a human emotion. Dogs are in the moment conditioned so unless there is consistant negatives associated with kids I can't really see something associated to the point of what would be called resent.

That said. Babies, baby spaces, baby stuff is 100% off limits for the dogs in our home that I shared with my brother and sister in law. When my sibling in law had her baby we set up the ground rules for the house. Dogs were no longer allowed in the rec room where the baby's toys were. Dogs were no longer allowed upstairs where the bedrooms were. To gain consistancy we installed indoor pet barriers which are like invisible fences to resist any sneaking or mad romps up and down the stairs and we trained this for 2 months before Tristan came home.

After baby came home we did a few things like when we had baby is fussy moments which required some animation on our part like mindless pacing with a screaming baby we put the dogs in their crates at the beginning of the crying and threw a biscuit in to keep them occupied. It took about two weeks and generally the dogs would beat us to the crates when he started crying. We wanted crying and other emotional things from the kid to be a blah moment for the dog and it seemed to us that the crates at the time to be a great option to keep everyone as calm as possible.

Any baby related items like car seats, binkies, strollers, and toys were avoidance items I gotta say more so than a redirect because for the dogs we were working with a redirect simply was not working well enough for what we needed. Since the rott/dobe mix just couldn't get past an item dropped on the floor not going immediately in her mouth.

Out of fairness for the dogs we did set up a really good structure for indoor behavior with spots that they were allowed throughout the house which we marked and directed with a Go to your spot command. We also endevored to keep the baby stuff up off the floor in rooms where they were allowed although it was really nice to have a binky fall on the floor not to be immediately pounced on by the dog.

We started like this and I am amazed how well it has worked with making Tristan a very powerful figure in the dog's eyes and we've endevored to make him aware of being fair to my brother's two dogs as he has grown up. I still giggle when I see Tristan give a dog easily four times his weight give the dog a command like down and watch the dog drop like a stone. Even now at 3 years old all dog interaction is watched very carefully both for the sake of the dogs and of course the kids.

We did learn a few things like when solid foods come out for babies dogs begin to circle the table like sharks so we quickly put an end to that behavior by placing the dogs outdoors during meals which we hadn't needed to do before.

All said. Congrats on your new baby! I'm thrilled for you. Was it a boy or a girl? Details please

Melissa, that was a great post with some excellent recommendations...

nicely worded Melissa.

Good post Melissa. We are expecting ours late August as well, so I'm trying to prepare as we speak.

And Congratulations John!!!

Edited by Alex Corral (05/28/2008 10:45 AM)
Edit reason: Punctuation

Here is the link to the ebook Debbie references:

http://leerburg.com/pdf/introducingdogsandbabies.pdf