WHAT DOG TRAINING HAS TAUGHT ME ABOUT EDUCATION; OR, WHY MY DOG MAKES ME THINK OF CHARLOTTE MASON, PART THE FOURTH

By now I've introduced you to Dora; discussed Cognitive-Behavioral theory, brain plasticity, and conditioning; and talked in what I hope are nuts-and-bolts terms about replication of positive and negative behaviors in children as well as dogs.  

SOME RANDOM OTHER USEFUL LESSONS AND PRACTICES I'VE LEARNED FROM DOG TRAINING: 

*An emphasis on the foundational importance of attention. The first piece of the "Tackling Reactivity" training module that I've been working through has to do with building –– Charlotte Mason's words! –– the habit of attention in your dog. You can't do anything with him until he feels that it's in his best interest to pay attention to you, screening out distractions. 

There's a game I play with Dora that's designed to help build the habit of attention. As with anything involving dogs, the conditioning tool I use is food. In the game, I have Dora sit in front of me and look at me –– not meet my gaze, because dogs interpret that as threatening, but generally focus on me instead of looking all around her at whatever else is going on in the environment. While she's focused on me, I feel her treats, one after another, really fast. As my trainer says, it's like I've become a fountain of treats, and she's getting them for no reason –– it's just her lucky day! Every now and again, I pause in the treat stream, say for a count of five. During that pause, she shouldn't look away from me, which means that I need to gauge her ability to focus on me, and not pause for too long. Then I resume the treat stream. Also every now and again, I toss a treat on the ground to one side. The idea is that she goes and gets it, then immediately comes and sits in front of me, focusing on me again. 

You do this game first in a place where the potential for distractions is low: inside, in a quiet room. Gradually you can move into more and more distracting environments, but always with the idea that you want your dog to succeed at the game, not fail. Over time, you are helping your dog to replicate the behavior of focusing on you in the presence of distractions, and to do it because he associates that behavior with being happy and excited. It's not that you've rewarded him, operantly, for looking at you, or indeed for doing anything at all, but that you have made looking at you and ignoring distractions the most pleasant possible behavior for the dog to engage in. 

Obviously to build attention in your children, you're not going to just stream-feed them gummi worms or M&Ms. But you can play attention-building games that are fun, and most importantly, that your children associate with your loving attention to them, which is hugely desirable and motivating. You can do a picture study game together, where you look at an image for a few minutes, then turn it around and everyone tries to narrate what they saw in as much detail as possible. This is a great game, because it's a game nobody can really lose. You don't make it a competition or a test, just a challenge to see how much you can remember. Matching games like Concentration are really good for this, too –– but the key conditioning agent, again, is your active, loving, happy participation in the game, while the game itself trains the brain to focus and retain. 

*As I think I said before, the effectiveness of small lessons daily. Copywork done in a big glob once a week, or once a month, or randomly when you get around to it, is NOT as effective as copywork done for two minutes daily. It isn't. It's really only effective as a daily habit. 

But again, what helps copywork to become a daily habit is that copywork is a pleasurable experience. You make a ritual of it: maybe first thing, before everybody is tired, get them sitting at the table with some lovely classical music on (knocking out composer study at the same time). You give maybe one minute's worth to start. You make it easy for the child to do well: use a prepared copybook with good lines and clear, easily visible print, or write it yourself in a lined notebook. For a very young writer, write on every other line of a primary-ruled notebook like the Mead Primary Journal, and let the child copy underneath your line, to minimize looking back and forth. Maybe you let the child have a little extra time to illustrate that day's copywork with colored pencils or nice crayons. You let the child write, maybe, in gold gel pen or some other really fun, pleasurable medium. 

You do that for a minute or two at the very start of your day, and it's done. And it was pleasant. That makes it easier to do again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. I will tell you: my children were very chaotic, and that was largely my fault, for being fairly internally chaotic myself, BUT we did copywork daily, and once it was established, everybody did it without even thinking about it or asking, "Do I have to?" That would have been like saying, "Does the sun have to come up?" It was that inevitable. 

So now I'm trying to habituate Dora to loose-leash walking in the same way. And the process is the same: we started out by walking up and down the hall, then the driveway. We'd have failed at an hour's walk, and I would have found it so difficult and unpleasant that I wouldn't have done it the next day. But five to ten minutes of successfully walking without pulling on the leash –– as soon as that becomes inevitable, we can start to extend our range. 

If you think of every lesson you do this way, especially those lessons that you have trouble enacting, or that your children have started to resist, then you can rewire those responses. You can make yourself learn to look forward to doing things you never got around to before. They can become inevitable parts of your day. And you can rehabituate your children to positive, not negative responses, mostly by not creating situations in which negative responses happen. The more they practice the positive responses, the more those will become ingrained. 

*Make your objectives modest and realistic, and re-evaluate where you are periodically. Realistically, you can't work on everything at once, especially where habit formation is concerned. You're not going to get attention and chores done automatically, all at the same time and/or right away. With Dora, at the moment I am working on 

*exercises to reduce reactivity to human voices heard from our backyard

*loose-leash walking

*exercises in general self-regulation

*exercises in attention

. . . usually within the course of the same day, but not all at once, and not with the expectation that everything can be mastered equally, on a consistent time frame. Work on loose-leash walking, for example, might mean that we spend two fifteen-minute bursts daily walking up and down the driveway with lots of treats. Work on reactivity to human voices heard from our backyard basically means that I anticipate, every time we go outside, which we do roughly every couple of hours during the day, that there might be neighbors out, and that I can make a lesson of our outdoor time by planning to have kibble to scatter for her to sniff. We might play the attention game once or twice during the day. I might also practice having her sit, then wait for a treat rather than giving it right away, to reinforce impulse control. 

But I'm not working on anything else. Those four items are my agenda. As one becomes solid, I might replace it with something else. But I'm not going to start, say, a whole course of agility training –– even though I think she'd be great at agility –– while we're still working on paying attention and walking on a leash. That's too much for me to keep my mind on, or for her to process well. We might get to agility later, but until other things are solidly established, it's not a priority. 

It's also good to have concrete targets, as well as realistic. As I constantly tell people, "to love learning" is not really an educational goal, because it's not something you can actually make happen consistently enough not to give you an anxiety attack. As soon as somebody complains about something, you feel like a failure, and that's when you think you have to change everything you do, which is a disaster not even waiting to happen. 

A concrete goal would be something like

*narrate every reading daily

*copywork daily

*no more than ten minutes of math daily

*picture study weekly

And so on. With Dora, my goal is not don't be reactive. I mean, ultimately I hope she will be less reactive, but you can see, I hope, how defeating don't be reactive would be as an objective. I can't make that happen, and I'd feel like a failure in a hurry if that were what I was aiming for. Instead, what I do aim for is to make sure that daily I am doing activities with her –– concrete exercises –– that over time will bear fruit in reducing her reactivity. 

*Keep a progress log for yourself. Homeschooling is a lot longer game, with far higher stakes, than dog training is. In either endeavor, however, it's so easy to get fixated on what isn't happening. That's why you need to note to yourself, daily, what good things went on –– shift your focus to what your children are doing, instead of what they aren't. 

I can tell you: it's a bummer to have a reactive dog sometimes. My last dog loved everybody and was universally beloved. Dora is the kind of dog you have to crate if people are coming to dinner, preferably in a room upstairs with a white-noise machine to reduce her ability to hear their voices in the house. She's cute, and if we're out walking people ask to pet her, or worse, just approach her, so that I have to say, "No! Sorry! She's not friendly!" I don't think she'd bite anybody, but I know that at best she'd rehearse the negative barking behavior I'm trying to train her out of, and I don't really want to find out the hard way whether she'd bite. I have had to yell at little children who came up to her –– not angrily, and not to threaten them, but because they did just walk right up to her without warning, and if there's anything I want less than to find out whether she'd bite, it's to find out that she would bite a child. (Yes, also, we are muzzle training to be on the safe side, and I've learned to schedule walks for when we're highly unlikely to run into anybody). 

Anyway, I love my dog, but sometimes she's embarrassing and difficult. That's why it's important for me to register her small wins. Today, for example, for the second time, we were out in the backyard while the neighbors behind us were out, calling to their dog and talking loudly to each other. Some weeks back, in the same situation, Dora would lose her mind. Barkbarkbarkbarkbarararararararark! I mean, the neighbors probably didn't register this, but I could see her just go right up over her threshold and away, out of control. Today when they were out, she looked up, tensed . . . then went back to sniffing the grass for kibble. I record this as progress, to remind myself that my dog is getting somewhere, that our training is bearing fruit. 

In the same way, I encourage you to take time every day to note the good things your children do, whatever they are. 

*Your children are allowed to have fun. This is actually something our online trainer says about dogs. Everything your dog does should not be a training session. They're allowed to play and rest . They need play and rest.  By the same token, your children are allowed to do things that aren't educational, and they're allowed –– in fact, as Charlotte Mason stresses, they should have a lot of –– free time for self-directed pursuits. Leisure is crucial to human flourishing, and every day should have room for it. Especially for children under ten, be extremely selective about what outside activities you commit to. They don't need team sports, classes, or enrichment experiences nearly as much as they need time for leisure. 

*Do not neglect self-care. You also are allowed to have fun. More than that, you are allowed to do things for yourself: buy clothes, get a haircut, take a shower, shave your legs, do whatever makes you feel like an attractive adult person. You are allowed to take care of your health. In fact, I'd say that that's an imperative (neglecting your health can be a violation of the Fifth Commandment, in fact, and one I have taken to confession before). Having children and educating them –– which means you're with them 24/7 –– is hard and overwhelming, but you are still a person. You will meet their needs far better if you are also doing whatever it takes to make sure your own needs are met. This, in fact, is your responsibility. 

Does that mean you have to spend a lot of money you don't have on clothes and haircuts? No, it does not. I get my hair cut roughly twice a year. I'm currently doing a No-Buy 2022 Challenge when it comes to clothes (for which I spent a good chunk of 2021 preparing, because you don't ever want to set yourself up to fail). Does that mean you get carte blanche for vanity? Not really. My hypothesis is that paying some attention to your appearance, so that you feel comfortable and happy in your own skin, is what frees you from the prison of self-consciousness, which is what personal vanity really is. Learning to love yourself as you are, and to feel beautiful as you are, releases you from that terrible, anxious net –– and frees you to love the people around you. 

Anyway, you too are a born person, and your needs are valid. Take the shower. Brush your teeth. Get dressed. Go for the walk. Have the date night with your husband. Let the children wait sometimes, or be under someone else's care for a little while. Do what you need to do to feel good. Your body and your life are a gift, and you are right not to squander that gift in self-neglect. 

This is actually also something my online dog trainer says. I'm not sure I was actually in danger of curtailing all my personal pleasures for the sake of my dog, but I guess some people are. Meanwhile, I know for a fact that this is what mothers tend to do, and I'm here to tell you not to do it. Take care of yourself. You'll last a lot longer that way. 

*Via an internet meme in a reactive-dog group: "Your reactive dog is not giving you a hard time. Your reactive dog is having a hard time." 

Carry this meme in your head, but replace "reactive dog" with "melting-down child." Or "resistant child." Or just "your child." They don't want to give you a hard time. If they're giving you a hard time, they're having a hard time. If you can reframe your thoughts that way, then you can respond in a constructive way to find a solution, and both of you will be happier. 

Also, now you know that I blog daily about my clothes and other random stuff, but I do still sometimes have these Large Educational Thoughts.